Mass Effect 3: Sunrise
by Pure Sabacc
Summary: A reimagining of Mass Effect 3's controversial finale in three parts.
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note:**__ The very nature of Mass Effect makes it unfeasible to tell a conventional, literary narrative centered upon Commander Shepard without assigning him or her a particular personality and backstory, characteristics that inevitably are not shared in each player's experience. The piece that follows, a retelling of Mass Effect 3's finale, is told through the lens of a single possible player character and is in no way meant to be a definitive vision of paths untrodden._

**Mass Effect 3: Sunrise**

The view at the top of the rubble heap was enough to break Shepard's stride. The Beam was less than a kilometer away now, a font of blinding, crystalline light that ripped skyward through drifts of smoke and low, angry clouds, but the pulsing monolith was not the thing that held the Commander's attention, nor were the trio of monolithic, jet claws that buttressed the base of the Beam with eighty stories of Reaper carapace. A cleared swath of slag and vitrified earth made up the slope down to the energy projector, and it was this devastation that held Shepard's eyes.

The horrors that the Reapers had brought to every world they touched were well known to the commander, better perhaps than any other organic being born in the past fifty thousand years. She had been there when Sovereign's geth sacked Eden Prime. She had seen the vaults of human biomass stored onboard the Collector dreadnaught. Images from Palaven, Thessia, and a dozen other worlds were seared into her waking memory, and her dreams echoed with the ruin of a species that once stood astride the Galaxy, a token left to her by the prothean beacon that had changed so much. The ashen cityscape to her back was itself an inescapable reminder of the Reapers' malignant power, and the monstrosities that still lurked there evoked their influence far more viscerally than a field of charred concrete.

And still, it was the unvaried deadness of the landscape before her that gripped Shepard in that moment. On every world that the Commander had opposed the Reapers since their harvest began, signs of life before the war had been all around her – half-collapsed skyscrapers, derelict homes, abandoned vehicles, even London's antique telephone boxes, gray now from ash and smoke. There was a germ of hope there, something to restore if they somehow prevailed. But this slag... it held none of those memories, none of that possibility, no indication of what it had been before it wasted into nothing. In it was the fate that waited with defeat, the cultures and peoples of the Galaxy ground into sediment and layered over the blackened concretes of the thousand civilizations that had been erased before them.

The weight of a hand on her shoulder plate pushed the rumination into the back of her mind, but a cold weight had settled in her chest where only the hot pounding of adrenaline had ruled before.

"Shepard?"

Garrus had mounted the crest of the hill. The whole of his attention seemed to be on her, as though the towering Reaper installation was just another tumbledown apartment building. She saw a pair of fresh scorings on the breastplate of his cobalt armor, felt the urge to reach out and touch them.

"I don't think I've really stopped to think about what we're trying to do, not really," she said, very quietly. "There was always another step, another mission to focus on instead of the big picture. But now..."

"Now you don't think about it for a little longer." Garrus unslung his rifle and propped it against a steel girder. "You'll have plenty of time for that after. Write a book with Liara or something. She'd like that."

Kaidan scrabbled up the last few meters of the heap and stopped beside them, his eyes fixed on the Beam. Behind him, a handful of other figures in Alliance combat fatigues were also making their over the uneven terrain from the sinkhole where their armored transport was marooned.

"The transmission's completely blown. We're on foot unless someone stops by to give us a lift."

He squinted at the triangular platform directly beneath the Beam.

"You'd think they'd try to seal it off or shut it down. The Reapers must know what we're trying to do by now."

"I'm not seeing much activity down there," Garrus said, crouched low and nuzzled up to his scope. "A few husks, maybe an armed unit or two, but not what I'd call a garrison."

"They probably didn't think we'd get this far." Shepard shouldered her assault rifle and stepped out onto the charred slope. "Let's not give them any more time to reconsider."

"Hold it, Commander." Admiral Anderson joined them, leaving Major Coates and the other marines on guard several meters below. Few of the Reapers' indoctrinated thralls were visible from their vantage point, but gunfire and inhuman screeching still echoed from districts within sniping range. "That's open ground down there, a kill zone. I can't give you cover, but you don't have to charge into this one alone, not this time."

He turned back and jerked his head in the direction of the destroyer's corpse. The ship had fallen across a block and a half of what had once been upscale housing and several of its jointed tentacles were buried in the remains of a neighboring complex of buildings, forming a low roof over the intervening street. A stream of troop transports had already begun to pour from the rubble-strewn tunnel, some of them so badly damaged that flames licked out from open maintenance panels. Soldiers emerged on foot as well, some missing combat helmets and other pieces of gear, even more walking with obvious wounds. And still, they came.

Shepard was watching a half-squadron of Alliance gunships skirt over the crater that had been the destroyer's eye cannon minutes before when she felt the air around her armor crackle. A sound and a sudden, familiar feeling of disorientation made Shepard turn back to the Beam and look upward. The others followed her gaze, and for a moment, none of them spoke or moved or breathed.

Like a vast, gauntleted hand reaching down from space, the Reaper tore through the cloud cover. Its six tentacle appendages splayed out beneath it as it fell, each one a colossus in its own right. When the lowermost pair struck the ground, the ship entity was deep into the wasteland on the far side of the Beam, but it still dwarfed the platform's perimeter towers, a finned mountain of impenetrable, black plate that blotted out the horizon.

Shepard saw two ranks of piercing yellow light emanating from the forward mass of the carapace before an impact tremor nearly threw her back onto the rubble.

_Harbinger. _

"Get to the Beam."

In one moment, Shepard was still frozen in place, staring upward at the Reaper as it settled onto its second set of tentacles. In the next, she felt her legs pumping beneath her, the weight of her rifle swinging in her arms. She was running, downhill.

"Now!"

She heard the footfalls behind her even as the command left her lips. Then there were more, running bodies flying across the melted surface. A buzz-whine filled the air above her and a deep rumble rose behind it. Shouting. The blast and recoil of a tank gun. Shepard did not look back. She just ran, and the blinding pillar of blue-white rose up before her.

A klaxon swept across the slag field in a wall of sound, pure menace. Before the noise could fade into the surrounding cityscape, one vertical rank of yellow pinpricks flared and a lance of screaming energy lashed out between two of the Beam's towers. The blow fell far to Shepard's left, but she still felt the heat of it through her shielding and combat gear, heard the bubbling squeal of evaporating steel and the concussion of something heavy collapsing to the ground.

_Faster._

Shepard leapt over a ragged depression and came down running. A six-wheeled Krogan tomkah thunder past on her right, tailed closely by an Alliance gunship. The aircraft's anti-personal gun was firing at something, but Shepard did not slow to look for its target. An instinct told her to move left and she did, too distracted by the pounding behind her ears and the light ahead to give the movement any thought.

Harbinger vaporized the gunship and cut the krogan vehicle in half in a single stroke, the first in a hail of attacks that rained down in an arc around the commander. When a lone marine who had somehow managed to get ahead of her vanished in a bloom of heat, she faltered for an instant and then pressed forward again, pounding through a searing cloud of ember and what had been flesh. Her helmet's filter kept out most of the smell, but she could still feel the give of flash-heated concrete under foot. Struggling against the smoke, Shepard heard voices piping through her ear receiver, knew vaguely that they must have been echoing against the inside of her visor since the Reaper opened fire.

"Anubis Company at quarter strength, the fields do nothing..."

"Break formation! As many targets as we can give it!"

"Do you have a fix on the Commander? Was she in the comm rig?"

"Leave the damn gun and move! Get yourself out!"

Swirling ash parted and the perimeter towers of the platform were flanking her, dark blurs that swallowed her peripheral vision. The Beam was a hundred meters away now, less, a slash of white through the fog of sensation that crowded out all but the most basic thoughts. There was nothing between Shepard and its platform but a patch of flat, dead terrain.

_A few steps. Past all of it but a few more..._

The world beyond her helmet contorted, air and earth and light shivering and clawing at one another like living things. Shepard's muscles pulsed and a boot came up, but when it came down again, she found nothing but air. She was tumbling, swimming through air. Warmth spread across her back and into her limbs, not entirely unpleasant, working through the tension in her calves and seeping into her skull. The feeling washed into and over her eyes, a starburst of color, and then passed, leaving nothing.

* * *

Time and time again, she saw the world die. In the years since the beacon on Eden Prime had reached into her mind, that failing sphere of blood and stone had risen into the light of her mind's eye often, only to fall into darkness once again when she woke. She knew its name without ever having been told, and knew that she was the last who would ever know it.

Words, dissonant and unsympathetic, rang about her in empty space.

"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance. And, at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. The protheans were not the first. They did not create the Citadel. They did not forge the mass relays. They merely found them. The legacy of my kind."

Tendrils clad in metal lurched from the world's black vastness, and amidst them many eyes watched.

"The Crucible is not a prothean design. It is the product of the civilizations of innumerable cycles. Each one rediscovers it, improves upon it, and ultimately fails. The protheans nearly completed their iteration of the device, but indoctrinated scientists, believing that they could use the Crucible to control the Reapers rather than destroy them, revealed its location and sealed its fate. This is merely one aspect of the cycle, and it shall recur again."

These words were newer, calm and resigned. With them, a shape resolved within the curvature of the world, a plated sphere mounted upon a great pylon, its far end aglow with light and movement. The tendrils closed around it and she felt the urge to recoil, to let darkness wash away the images as it always did. But, this time, she knew she could not look away. Waking would not bring relief. The dead world was all around her, and the only way out was through.

"Strength for Cerberus is strength for every human. Cerberus is humanity."

And now, she remembered.

* * *

Shepard's body shook with a sudden spasm and she bolted up into a sitting position.

"Him."

The word tumbled out without her knowing why, a last throe of the quickly-receding dream state.

"What?" The voice was close at hand, breathless. "Shepard, are you with me? We have to move!"

She felt a jolt of pain shoot through her skull and clutched at her head. Someone had removed her helmet, and she felt blood welling from her scalp. Touching the wound brought more pain, and with it her other senses resolved. She saw chunks of slag and jagged concrete scattered about her legs, heard the screech of hyper-accelerated matter ripping through atmosphere and armor, felt something close about her and hoist her onto her feet.

"We've got to get her to cover!"

"There is no cover! We've got to make it to the Beam!"

Slowly, as though she had never moved in such a way before, Shepard looked left, then right. Garrus and Kaidan were hefting her down the last of the slope, their arms locked together behind her shoulders. Garrus' bowl-faced helmet was also gone, and she could see his mandibles flare and flatten against his jaw from exertion as they stumbled along. The biotic's faceplate was still in place, but she could see that much of the armor covering his chest was burned away, revealing a mass of blackened fabric and oozing skin.

"Kaidan..."

The major's eyes met hers through his visor and his pace slowed.

"The suit got the worst of it, Commander. Can you walk?"

Shepard could feel the tips of her boots scrapping along the slag. She willed one to move, to come down flat, and the other followed.

"Yeah. Yeah, I can." She slipped from their arms and grabbed Garrus' waist plate, testing each leg. "Keep on the objective. I'll be right behind both of you."

A blinding pool of yellow light fell across them. Garrus tried to bring his gun to bear on the source of the illumination and vortices of biotic distortion manifested in Kaidan's palms, but Shepard found herself empty-handed, her rifle lost in the blast. Her right hand shot to her hip, but the hair on her head pricked up before she could draw the sidearm, charged with a ripple of static electricity. Her hand fell away and she looked upward.

Through the glare, Harbinger looked back at her.

"Shepard." Garrus' voice was whisper. "I..."

She tried to turn away from the consuming light, but her muscles rebelled against her, as though they no longer were hers at all. Words echoed in her head, more than a memory.

_Know this as you die in vain: your time will come, your species will fall._

It was all she could do to shift her arm and probe for Garrus' hand. A leaden fingertip brushed up against something solid.

The tremor was so powerful that Shepard actually heard the ground beneath her groan and crack as she was knocked off of her feet. Then she was on her back, watching immobile as the tops of the Beam's perimeter towers swayed violently against the roiling clouds. It took the commander a moment to realize that the structures were shuddering too rapidly to be simply moving under the earthquake's influence – whatever construct they were a part of was thrashing of its own accord, and the ground was moving with it. Between the clawed peaks, the crystalline light of the Beam pulsed star-bright for an instant, and when the flaring faded, Harbinger was in the air, its eyes turned skyward. The ship entity's monstrous mass effect field tore through gravity and cloud cover alike, and in a few heartbeats the only trace of Harbinger was the distant roar of a sonic boom.

The vibrations of the towers continued for a few more seconds before subsiding into a metallic shriek that emanated from the ground beneath them. Another sound rose and entwined with the clatter as Shepard and her companions were pulling themselves back onto their feet, a chorus of ghoulish wailing that any Alliance solider could identify instantly.

"The husks," Kaidan said, his sidearm aimed at the Beam platform.

The low, spike-trimmed structure was less than thirty meters away now, close enough that Shepard could make out the guardians that Garrus had scoped out before Harbinger's arrival. Her pistol was in hand and trained on the gray, corpse-like creatures before her eyes truly registered them, her muscles primed for the ingrained shoot-shoot-stab-stomp routine that would put the mindless things down and keep them down for good. But the first knot of husks she saw weren't shambling down from the platform, skeletal, once-human hands outstretched – half a dozen were flat on their naked backs, cybernetic-knit spines arched stiffly upward as they moan with mouths that did not move. Another group, clustered around a spine of Reaper carapace that jutted from the edge of the platform, was still upright but just as oblivious to the living bodies close by. They had one of their own number surrounded, a corrupted turian by the remnant of a crest at the back of its skull, and seemed intent on tearing it limb from limb. The beset creature was armed with a projectile weapon and cut down a handful of husks until one, relieved of half its face and most of its left arm by the gunfire, leapt onto the turian's plated chest and began clawing with its remaining hand.

Shepard brought a hand up to her ear and was rewarded with a burst of static from her transceiver, still in place even though her helmet was lost somewhere in the killing field behind them.

"Sword, this is Hammer," she said. "Are you still up there, Admiral?"

There was a pause, long enough to draw a look from Kaidan.

"Affirmative, Commander." A flurry of indistinct voices accompanied Hackett's. "What is Hammer's status?"

Shepard glanced back at the ruined slope. A haze of dust and ash hung heavily over much of it, opaque and ghostly in the Beam's light. There were hints of movement further up the slag, far-off sounds that mingled with the husks' wailing, but there was little to suggest that the combined military might of the Galaxy had marched at her back only minutes before.

"We're... a few of us made it to the beam, sir," Shepard said. "Harbinger got here before we did. There was no way anything could have made it through that kind of a barrage, but it just withdrew before it could finish us off."

A new voice carried over the line.

"Hostile destroyer groups two, three, five, and nine collapsing! All capital ships in that zone have begun to fall back towards orbital terminus three!"

Hackett issued a few quick, inaudible commands and then spoke back into his communicator.

"Same thing on our end, Commander. The Reapers were really tearing into us, and then they just stopped advancing. Best guess, something's disrupted their command and control capability. Damned if I know what, but we're not going to get another chance like this. I'm bringing in the Crucible now."

"And we'd better have the Citadel open when you get there," Shepard said, voice rising as a sudden burst of interference clogged the channel. "Acknowledged, Admiral."

"Hostile exiting the Beam!"

Garrus raised his rifle to his shoulder and trained it on the center of the platform. A large figure, nearly the size of the krogan-turian amalgamations that the Reapers used as shock troopers, was lurching out of the white-blue cascade. Shepard and Kaidan trained their weapons on it as well, and the commander took a step back, acutely aware of the lack of cover anywhere nearby.

The thing had the death mask of a typical human husk, the same lamp-like eyes and metallic skin, but there was still evidence of clothing over its grotesquely-muscled frame and a recognizably human weapon was half-fused into one arm. The shoulder plate draped awkwardly above the gun bore a familiar gold symbol, recognizable even at range: one elongated hexagon laid upon another.

Cerberus.

After clearing the Beam, the new arrival found itself standing over one of the smaller, immobile husks. Its head lacked a neck to pivot on, but the creature shifted its weight abruptly, a marionette-like movement that brought its eyes into contact with those of its slighter fellow. The husk did not recoil or move in any way, but the pitch of its wailing spiked, producing a noise that was unsettlingly close to a genuine scream of terror. The noise amped higher and higher, until the corrupted Cerberus agent crushed the husk's head under the hard mass of synthetic flesh and cracked composite that had once been its foot.

The creature turned to dispatch the next prone form, but the husks still capable of movement turned from their smear of cybernetic implants and turian biomass and lurched toward the larger figure, that same unearthly cry beginning to rise from their frozen maws. Gun-arm flashed, rattled, and the first husk disintegrated under a brief and brutal burst of fire. The next exploded mid-leap, withered flesh and augmented bone shredded from sternum to groin.

"What the hell's going on up there?"

By way of response to Kaidan's question, Garrus fired off a shot that put a fist-sized hole in the Cerberus thing's chest, right where the heart should have been. It turned away from the remaining husks and swung its weapon towards the turian, but another bullet socketed into the creature's mouth and ripped out the back of its skull. Limp, it spun backwards and collapsed on its side, a scant meter from the eddying light of the beam. The husks were on it in an instant, blade-like fingers grating against armor and digging out chunks of desiccated viscera.

"Can't say I'm very fond of the Cerberus friends we've been making lately," Garrus said as he thumbed another explosive round into the chamber of his sniper rifle. "And it doesn't seem like the full Reaper treatment has done much for their dispositions."

Shepard nodded. Worrying about why the indoctrinated were suddenly attacking one another was as useful as lingering on the fact that Harbinger hadn't reduced the lot of them into a dispersing cloud of cinders when it had the chance. The biggest question mark of the insane assault still lay ahead, and any Reaper infighting, no matter what might be causing it, only increased their odds.

"Let's hope the Illusive Man didn't deliver the Reapers too many more recruits when he went over. Come on, we don't have much time."

Shepard took a step towards the platform, her weapon trained on the frenzied husks, but Kaidan put a hand on her shoulder before she could advance any further. His other hand was raised to the side of his helmet.

"Commander, switch back to the main Hammer channel," he said, clearly distracted. "I think... yes! We're not alone out here! It's the..."

The ground between them dissolved into a spray of smoke and chipped concrete. An impact at shoulder level sent Shepard spinning sideways, away from Kaidan. A wash of heat and electrical hissing instantly told her that her suit's kinetic shielding had absorbed a hit, but without her helmet's HUD she couldn't be immediately sure what had shot her, or from where. She managed to catch herself and crouched low, trying to reduce her profile as much as possible in the open terrain. Somewhere next to her, Garrus' rifle cracked and was answered by the chatter of fire from the direction of the Beam. Three more of the Cerberus creatures were wading out of the light with their weapons raised and spraying.

Shepard took a breath, focused on the foremost hulk and fired in its direction until the thermal clip of her pistol heat-discharged. It was a long shot for an unscoped weapon, evidenced by the unfocused nature of the return fire, but more than half of her rounds found their mark. Each hit prompted a flash of light that momentarily obscured a part of Shepard's target, but when the luminance receded, the thing was still moving. It plodded forward, leapt from a raised lip of the platform onto the melted surface, and raised its misshapen weapon arm into a firing position once more.

"Some of these things still have shields," Shepard said as she slapped another clip into her pistol and began to back away from the advancing creature. "Kaidan, can you disrupt them?"

The response that came from her right was more a grunt than any word she could understand, but a mass effect field flickered into being around the indoctrinated trooper's torso and lashed against its suit barrier. A storm of minute distortions, whirlpools of light and fluctuating gravitation, quickly overwhelmed the weakened defense system and the wearer suddenly found itself floating half a meter off of the ground, caught in a bubble of neutral gravity. Garrus was quick to take advantage and the thing's gaping, rigid face was flying away from its body in several pieces by the time the biotic anomaly subsided a few seconds later.

"Next target!" Shepard shouted. "Left!"

Another of the corrupted humans collapsed before it reached the edge of the platform, but the others advanced unperturbed, firing with accuracy that increased with each step. A flurry of bolts shattered a centimeter from Shepard's forehead, staggering and blinding her momentarily. Her suit's shield projectors weren't designed to deflect weapons fire indefinitely, and the smell of ozone filling her nostrils was anything but a positive indicator of their status.

"No good, Shepard!" Garrus called out over the din. His sniper rifle lay discarded a few paces in front of him and a close-range turian repeater fired short bursts in his hands. "We've got to break!"

"No!"

Shepard knew that if they turned and ran flat out for the nearest of the Reaper spires, one or two of them might make it to cover. But then what? The Beam and whatever lay on the other side of it was everything, their only shot. If they broke now, there was a good chance that no one would ever get close to the platform again. If she turned away, everything she had done and everyone who had sacrificed themselves for this moment would be dust on a dead world.

The commander chanced a sideways look at Garrus, fully aware that more creatures were emerging from the Beam and that the ones already out weren't going down quickly enough. Shepard had known and fought alongside the turian for years, shared the most intimate of experiences two sentients could with him, and she still hadn't mastered his subtle, alien facial expressions. His eyes, though, she knew, and the alertness in them told her everything she needed in that moment.

"We hold here," Shepard said. "You're with me?"

"Always."

The gun of one of the Cerberus troopers traced a path in the slag between the two of them and they responded in kind, firing until it dropped onto one knee, oozing black ichor from its wounded organic components.

"And you, Kaidan?" Shepard called, not daring to turn away this time.

Something moved above her head and for a heartbeat Shepard expected to hear Harbinger's baleful klaxon, but the object was too small, too fast, and too close. It streaked over her and landed behind the staggered trooper like an artillery shell, sending it flying three full body lengths. The air around the impact site crackled with biotic energy as a slender figure rose up at its heart, its fists engulfed in spheres of roiling distortion.

"You run with the nicest guys, Shep!" Jack appraised the next rank of once-humans with a grin. "A few of them look like they need a good fucking, and I'm in a damn good mood for it!"

She was in the middle of them before Shepard could even begin to respond, a blur of coruscating energy and tattooed flesh that made the indoctrinated hulks look like dented metal trash cans caught up in a hurricane. The commander watched the spectacle transfixed, a mixture of relief and confusion swirling around in her head like the anomalies rippling down Jack's bare arms. A spinal column cracked loudly somewhere in the melee, and a hundred other sounds poured into Shepard's conscious mind with it.

The rev and hum of motors and drives. The unmistakable clamor of many feet running. Weapons of a dozen different makes and classifications cracking and hissing and roaring. And above it all, voices. Different words, different languages, vocal apparatuses of wildly divergent biology and none at all, rising together.

A battle cry.

The first wave rushed past Shepard with the reckless abandon of a force ten times its number. Shepard guessed that there were no more than two dozen individuals in the battle line, mostly Alliance marines with a handful of alien soldiers scattered throughout – asari commandos, salarian special forces, even a quarian with a missile launcher slapping against the back of his environment suit as he ran. Many were only armed with sidearms, and a few didn't seem to have any weapons in hand at all, but they threw themselves at the Cerberus monstrosities all the same. The remnants of the vanguard that Jack hadn't already crumpled into twitching bricks disintegrated almost immediately under the sudden barrage, but more were still spilling out of the Beam. Many more.

A hand closed around Shepard's ankle and she looked down to see a man in battered Alliance combat gear collapsed at her feet. She dropped down and slid her arm under his shoulders as delicately as she was able. The soldier's helmeted head rolled backward and Shepard saw that the visor was smashed, the composite around in it ruptured least two places. Unable to see through cracked and tinted glass, Shepard didn't recognize him until she noticed the large, matted wound on his chest.

"Kaidan..."

It came together in a dreadful instant of realization, the frantic single-mindedness of the battlefield swept away. Shepard had seen the wound Kaidan had sustained during the charge, but she hadn't had time to ask him if his personal shields were still functional. They had been exposed to enemy fire for well over a minute and Kaidan had been fighting, drawing fire, for all of it. The commander remember the shots exploding in front of her face and a crushing pressure clamped down on her gut.

A wheeze escaped through the fissured faceplate.

"We need a medic! Garrus!"

The turian took in the scene in a glance and jogged off without another word, angling towards a small group of armored vehicles that were weaving their way down the blasted slope, headlights and combat lamps illuminating snapshots of Harbinger's ruinous power in the deepening gloom.

Shepard activated her omnitool and ran the holographic interface over Kaidan. The readings weren't precise, but she had seen battlefield trauma far too many times, and there were some signs that didn't require much interpretation. The pressure had spread into her throat, and when she tried to speak, the effort was almost too much to bear.

"I'm getting this helmet off of you, okay Kaidan?" She brought her hands to the neck seal but paused when she found the lining cracked and leaking blood. "I've got medigel. Just a little and you'll be fine. Just wait a second, Kaidan. I'm right here."

Shepard caught a whispering, burbling sound and Kaidan shifted in her arm, as though he was trying to sit upright.

"Don't move," she said, fumbling one handed for one of her hip pouches. "No one's leaving you here. I've just got to get the medigel, and you'll be up in no time. Can't have you racked up in the hospital again. Just one second."

With a suddenness that made Shepard catch her breath, Kaidan went stiff and a wave of energy swept down his body, covering both of them in a sheath of swirling, flame-like distortion. Then his hands were on her back and arms imbued with an irresistible strength pulled her closer, until her face was level with his. She still couldn't make out flesh beyond the shattered glass of his visor plates, but now there were two points of blue light burning in the darkness.

"Everybody dies." Kaidan's voice was calm, quiet, and perfectly clear. "My time, not yours. Do what you've always done, Shepard. I'm sorry that I couldn't see you to the end. I'm sorry for doubting. I'm sorry... sorry that I never told you."

The lights burned for a second more and winked out. Shepard's skin tingled with the lightness of the biotic field, and then that too was gone.

"You never had to."

Shepard lowered the limp body to the ground and rose. She looked down at the helmet and was taken by the sudden urge to remove it, to let Kaidan look free on Earth's dark sky, but the commotion of battle was already filtering back into her awareness. Automatic reactions took over and Shepard felt herself turn away, draw her weapon and check its clip, appraise the disposition of the fighting nearest her. As she watched a marine empty her rifle into the chest of a toppled Cerberus monstrosity, it occurred to Shepard that she couldn't remember the last time that she had cried.

The thought retreated as the three-wheeled frame of a Mako ground to a halt between her and the battle line.

"Its damn good to see you still breathing, Commander." Admiral Anderson jumped from the back hatch of the transport and grabbed her by the upper arm, giving it a good shake. He seemed to be favoring his right leg slightly as he moved, but was otherwise unhurt. "I haven't seen anyone move like that in a long time. Where's Major Alenko?"

A handful of soldiers followed Anderson out of the fighting vehicle, Garrus with them. Shepard shared a look with him and the turian's eyes fell to the ground.

"Kaidan didn't make it, sir," she said.

Anderson nodded slowly.

"That's... he was a fine soldier. One of the best."

There were a thousand ways Shepard could have responded, a thousand things that absolutely needed to be said, apologies and thank yous and goodbyes for everyone she had cared for and lost without having the chance... but Kaidan had asked one thing of her. Just one.

She would do what she always did.

"Yes, sir. The best."

Garrus was fiddling with the range finder of his rifle, adjusting it and readjusting it with quick snaps of his fingers, just as he had done when he had learned of Legion's sacrifice on Rannoch.

"Admiral." Major Coates was leaning out from the Mako's hatch, the right half of his face covered with a medigel patch. "The last group's reported in. We're waiting on your order."

Anderson edged out of the cover provided by the vehicle's hull and Shepard and the rest followed. The remnants of Hammer were almost to the edge of the platform, using the fallen Cerberus hulks and blast holes in the slag as cover while a mob of still-functional indoctrinated units rained fire down on them at close range, unrelenting even as their barriers failed and parts were shot from their synthetic-encrusted frames. Jack and a several other biotics stood in the middle of the crossfire, projecting shields of nullified space to cover the allied forces as they advanced, but Hammer was still taking casualties as fast as the creatures were, and more monstrosities were still lumbering out of the Beam.

"We can't clear that platform with ordinance without risking the Beam and we can't try and attrition these things out," Anderson said, raising his voice so that everyone gathering around the Mako could hear. "Major, give our heavies a go. We're doing this the old fashioned way."

Coates ducked back out of sight to relay the order and Anderson lifted his assault rifle one-handed into the air. The assembled marines broke for the rest of Hammer without hesitation and Shepard fell in with them, Anderson and Garrus close on her heels. Other small groups were moving from the night into the luminance cast by the Beam as well, some of them bellowing or chattering in tongues that Shepard had heard on the opposite side of the battlefield more often than on hers. Ahead, a geth prime, twelve feet of integrated weapon systems and crimson plate, waded out into the line of fire, its pulse rifle burning through barriers and turning exposed Reaper synthetics into puddles of molten metal.

Anderson matched Shepard's pace, his limp made obvious by the effort of running, and shoved his rifle into her hands before drawing his own sidearm.

"You're better with that than I ever was," he said, panting. "Sorry we didn't have time to go back for your helmet. I know you've already lost one once."

"I'll pick it up when we get back," Shepard said. "Try and find it while I'm gone, if you're feeling guilty."

"Oh, I'm not letting you jump into this one without me."

The two of them veered out of a spray of fire and crouched behind a dead hulk as rounds ripped into its flesh. Peering over the thing's shoulder, Shepard saw an asari in the distinctive uniform of a justicar fling an armored monster in a pack of smaller, more husk-like creatures that had just materialized from the light cascade.

"You deserve to have someone watching your back, Commander," Anderson said, pistol held at the ready. "Whatever happens up there, remember that it's not just you and your team, not this time. We're all behind you."

And then they were out, adding their own fire to a barrage that intensified as more and more of the battle line saw Shepard stepping out into the fray. In twos and threes, warriors of every species and affiliation leapt from what meager cover they had been able to find, and the sound of weapons fire drowned out everything save the pounding the commander felt drumming against the inside of her skull. The sheer ferocity of the attack seemed to finally give the defenders pause and as they cringed back behind failing shields and shattered limbs, a path to the Beam opened in their ranks. Once again, the commander became the crest of a wave of bodies in desperate motion, but this time there was no machine god to break it.

Shepard came to one of the wide ramps that converged on the light cascade and began to climb, her rifle reporting in a constant, rapid rhythm as she advanced. Halfway up, some instinct or flickering in the corner of her eye sent Shepard spinning to one side. She saw the thing as it dove at her from the base of a slender pylon thrust from the platform, skeletal arms outstretched, scythe-like fingers splayed, dual-pupil eyes trained on her like firing nodes. An impact changed its trajectory and ripped out a length of its spine before Shepard could bring her gun to bear, sending it tumbling off of the platform with a gurgle of ruptured wetware.

The commander knew the shooter without having to search for him. Garrus still had her back.

That knowledge propelled Shepard forward and she cleared the rest of the ramp without slowing. She caught a glimpse of Jack to her right, felt the shockwave that sent half a dozen creatures sprawling onto the unyielding Reaper plate. To the left, a roar bludgeoned its way through the cacophony, resounding as much with joy as it did with rage.

Within meters of the Beam, a corrupted trooper of extraordinary size stepped across her path. Unlike its fellows, this creature had shed every discernibly human feature save its general body shape, and the weapons it had at the end of each arm were like nothing she had ever seen, entwined and infused with Reaper technology that made their muzzles leak the cold, bluish light of mass effect cores. The shots she pumped into its outthrust chest caromed off of a black carbon sheen that covered it from head to waist. It leveled a weapon at her but she was already inside its range, ducking and pivoting around its trunk legs, now almost close enough to the Beam to touch it.

The shaft of the other encysted weapon slammed her hard onto the platform. Shepard forced herself onto her back and brought up the rifle, firing blind. The flat of a foot the size of a human torso loomed above her face, its toeless rim already caked with gore. It was moving down when she registered it and Shepard had no time to do anything other than close her eyes.

A roar punched through the wall of noise once more, this one punctuated by a throaty grunt and the rip of a projectile weapon. Shepard forced her eyes open and found that her field of vision was clear save for the Beam reaching up into darkness behind her. She pushed up onto her elbows, still dazed from the blow. The huge creature was thrashing on its back a few paces away, a krogan boot on the place where its neck should have been and an automatic shotgun unloading into its belly. A reptilian face slashed with a vertical, four-part scar looked up from its work and met Shepard's unsteady gaze.

Wrex's lips mouthed a single syllable before the prone monstrosity jerked upward, forcing the krogan to smash it back down with the butt of his weapon.

Shepard rolled over once again, finding her hands and knees. A wall of blinding luminance soared up in front of her, so close that she could feel the slight warmth and vibration of the device projecting it. She began to crawl, one hand forward, then a knee. Something smashed into her side, overloading her barriers in a flash of ozone and sending a jolt of pain up her spine. She kept moving, hand then knee, hand then knee.

The Beam closed around the commander, a waterfall without moisture or pressure or sound. She tried to orient herself, tried to stand, but there was nothing within the column but light, nothing solid to counteract a sudden feeling of weightlessness. And then, she was flying.


	2. Chapter 2

Blackness, undifferentiated and absolute. There was no sense of depth or hint of form in the space beyond Shepard's eyes, no way of telling if she was looking out on a starless, intergalactic void, lying face-first against the inner wall of a sealed cargo crate, or just staring at the inside of her own eyelids. She gave the latter a try, just to be sure. There was a familiar sensation of movement, a slight pressure, but her ocular nerves were left unsatisfied. Shepard could have believed that she was still unconscious, trapped in the fog of another dream, but there was no dead world looming in front of her, no shades and shadowed tendrils, no running child. Restful sleep was as alien to her now as anything that she had seen on her first visit to the Citadel.

_The Citadel._

Shepard let out a breath and was surprised to see a small, semi-circular ripple form in the curtain of darkness. She blinked a few more times and focused. There were indistinct shapes now, too, quite close by. A few more releases of breath revealed a stretch of liquid that stretched out beneath her eye, deeper, smoother darkness against the uneven mass of gray that was beginning to resolve from the gloom. Some of that fluid splashed into her mouth and Shepard realized that she was lying in it.

It was blood, human blood, and certainly not her own. She had tasted the lingering tang many times before, but it had always been warm, the result of a bitten tongue or cut lip. This was different, gut-wrenchingly so.

Shepard pushed up onto her arms and was rewarded by a lance of pain that originated from her left hip, at point near the base of her spine. The smell of ozone and the flash of a collapsing barrier came back to her, and memory of the Beam flooded in with it.

She attempted to reach up for her ear, but the muscles in her other arm rebelled and she was forced to roll onto her back. A gasp of agony escaped her, echoing off something high above before fading into the silence. The commander cringed reflexively at the sound and realized that the space around her lacked for ambient noise just as it lacked for light. She listened to her own labored breathing for a few moments before the strength required to try for the transceiver again finally returned.

"Hammer, this is Commander Shepard," she said. "Does anyone copy?"

Static.

She fingered a tiny node, manually cycling through presets.

"Garrus, what's your status? Anderson? Wrex, do you read?"

There was nothing but the soft buzz of dead air.

Shepard forced herself into a sitting position and probed her armor gingerly for the breach that she knew must be there. Pain from the pressure of her hand led to the spot quickly, two coin-sized breaches at the seam between the composite-reinforced plastic sheathes that covered her back and upper thigh. It didn't hurt as badly as it had the first time she had moved, an indication that her armor's automated trauma layer was already applying anesthetizing medigel to the damaged tissue. Manual application would be more thorough, but she couldn't do that without peeling off most of the suit, and wherever she was, it definitely wasn't the place.

After a few more steadying breaths, Shepard stood. Even that effort was an ordeal, and not just because every muscle in her body seemed to be on fire. The ground was far from the cleared, melted terrain that had surrounded the Beam – this surface was covered in a thick carpet of heavy, irregular shapes that slipped and gave in odd ways when she put her weight on them. She stepped down and tested the pool of blood with a boot. It was far deeper than she had expected, nearly up to her ankle, but there was solid metal beneath.

It couldn't be blood, then. Coolant or some other light mechanical fluid.

The conclusion seemed to clear away some of the shock-fog that was still slowing her thought processes and she forced herself to start analyzing the situation, disorientation or no. She had made it through the Beam, and there was only one destination at the end of that line. The first priority was to get her bearings – the Citadel was enormous, and she didn't have time to wander aimlessly through its bowels.

Shepard was standing in the cool liquid, feeling about for the weapon that Anderson had given her when her eyes finally adjusted enough to give definition to the gradations of darkness. She spotted the triangular stock of the rifle jutting from a jumbled pile of loose cables and grabbed hold it. The gun came free easily enough, still just a silhouette against deep shadows, but the movement upset one of the cables and an end flopped into the stuff pooled around her feet. The commander was too busy checking the rifle's ammunition and targeting displays to pay the loose end much heed, but when she toggled on the combat lamp, the beam was aimed directly at it.

A human hand lay there, fingers immersed up the knuckle in dark red liquid.

The commander's breathing tapered to nothing as slowly moved the beam upward, casting illumination over an arm, then a shoulder, then a whole tangle of limbs pressed between bodies, stacked one upon the next upon the next.

Dispassionate words echoed through her head, the prothean AI's last warning.

_The Citadel is in position. The Reapers are preparing to complete their harvest of your species._

Corpses radiated out in every direction. They were everywhere, everything, arms and legs and pale faces that melded into a landscape of death unlike anything Shepard had ever seen or even imagined was possible. Mounds of unmoving humanity loomed up from the gloom wherever her eyes searched, some of them piled to her full height, others even higher. Ridges and peaks flowed into one another and in the few ragged paths between where bodies lay only one or two thick, dark streams and still, heavy pools choked out any sign of the floor beneath.

There was no strong odor, no obvious signs of putrefaction, no indication that any effort had been made to even remove their clothing. The faces staring out at her were as they had been when they were culled, as though the blood around her feet had pumped in their veins only minutes before. Some had the emotions of their last moments frozen into their flesh, mouths open in fear or rage or agony, but most were simply dead, blank ovals of white, who or whatever they had been before drained away with their bodily fluids.

Shepard fought down a spasm of nausea and forced herself to walk. Spotting a ravine that seemed wider than the other paths between the abattoir heaps, she moved into the deepest part of the blood flow, where outflung limbs and half-submerged human forms punctuated her progress only occasionally. Her boots sent up dark ripples with each forward step and from time to time a slip or misplaced foot would produce a splash that resounded far above the dead hills, giving Shepard the impression that the darkness disguised a space truly vast in scale. She tried to latch onto that thought, to refocus on the task at hand, but there was no way to fully block out the horror that pressed so close all around her.

An older, dark-skinned man in the tattered remnants of the business suit, dried streaks etched into his cheeks and under the corners of his mouth. A crumpled mass of four or five men and women in outdated combat fatigues, several with rents in their chests and backs that exposed ribs and ruined organs. A girl in a tiny green jumpsuit, spread out against the side of a mound like an abandoned doll.

Shepard seemed to be moving out of the darkest part of that hell. The heaps to either side were beginning to diminish in size, now clearly visible without the lamp and slightly tinged with ruddy light. There was the suggestion of a ceiling, girded at intervals by what looked like rectangular support struts, but she had no way of gauging its true distance or determine what was lighting it. The commander's pace quickened and she shut off her guide beam, alert for noise and movement amidst the remains. Then, finally, the dead dwindled away and Shepard found herself on the edge of a precipice.

For the second time in her life, Commander Shepard looked out upon the most subtle and terrible trap ever conceived, in her time or any other. The vastness that loomed beyond her perch was, in practical terms, still the Citadel, the lynchpin of the mass relay network, a forty-four kilometer technological marvel that had served as the seat of galactic civilization for eons beyond organic reckoning. But that wonder was a lie, an illusion that persisted only as long as its five ward arms remained open. They were closed now, locked together in an impenetrable, cylindrical shell just as they had been when Sovereign had appeared to rip the political and economic heart from the Galaxy's incorporated peoples and summon the rest of its kind from their darkspace hibernation. Sovereign had been destroyed before the Citadel's true functionality could be utilized, but the Reapers would not be thwarted. They had reclaimed their masterpiece.

The commander had to grapple with the sheer scale of the scene for a few moments before she could really begin to grasp it. Beyond a gulf of emptiness wide enough to encompass most of the armada Admiral Hackett had led through the Charon Relay, a thick band of black metal wrapped in a semi-circle across her entire field of vision. The deep depression that served as the central axis marked it as the Presidium, but there was no sign of its lavish parks, its lakes or its gleaming, white towers. There was no way to be sure at this distance, but the ring district's atmospheric dome also appeared to be gone, as though it had simply popped out of place and floated off, blowing away everything and everyone beneath in the process.

Shepard knew that the sight should have horrified her – fifteen million living souls had crowded the station when the Normandy had docked last, many of them refugees who had already lost their homeworlds – but it only left her feeling numb. There was only so much devastation a being could bear before either madness descended or it all melded into nightmarish background noise, abstract and impersonal. Shepard wasn't entirely convinced that the former wasn't happening to her, but insane or not, she still had a purpose.

She took a steadying breath, noting the fact that she hadn't asphyxiated and the localized atmospheric containment that implied, and scanned the rest of the vista. Tilting her head up, Shepard saw the great cathedral vault of the sealed wards, their inner surfaces charged with a crimson energy that cracked down the length of the arms in arcs the size of dreadnaughts. The commander was too far away to discern if the metropolis that had once filled the wards with the richness of hundreds of worlds was still intact, but there was no more indication of life there than in the ring. A careful downward glance revealed even less, just a maw of darkness that induced an immediate and intense feeling of vertigo.

There was only one place she could be.

The length of the Presidium's central anchoring pylon stretched out to Shepard's left and right. The dim light only around her to see around one hundred meters in either direction, but it was immediately apparent how much the Reaper's occupation had altered the structure. What had once been block after horizontal block of Council offices and high priority docking platforms had been drawn back into two parallel slabs of superstructure, and the space between put to use by its true masters.

Shepard steeled herself and turned back to face the landscape of lifeless human forms. _This_ was what the Reapers wanted of humanity, millions of years of evolution, millennia of progress, all reduced to biomass.

"...command..."

The word forced its way through a sudden burst of static on her transceiver. Shepard's hand shot up to her ear and she increased the volume, then winced as the voice dissolved into an even louder hissing.

"This is Shepard receiving," she said. "I do not copy. Repeat, I do not copy."

"... moving into... too..."

It was Joker's voice. The commander cycled to a reserve communications frequency.

"Normandy, I'm getting a too much interference on your end. Repeat your last."

When the reply finally came, it wasn't Joker, and the static was slightly lessened.

"Is that you, Shepard?" Anderson's was distant and muffled, as though his transceiver had been knocked loose. "Thank God. We lost track of you during the last push."

"What's your status, Admiral? Do you have any fix on your location?"

"The damned Beam dumped us all across this..." His voice faded out for a moment. "...woke up near some kind of aperture, the thing's end point, I think, but the rest are scattered. I've got a few marines and we might have a fix on..." Another lapse. "...not many of them, but we've already taken casualties. We've got to get to the Tower before any others figure out we're here. Hold on. I think I see..."

Anderson was cut off again, but this time it wasn't static. The familiar report of a sniper rifle echoed through the transceiver, and Shepard heard it in her other ear a split-second later, a faint sound that resounded from her right, beyond the piled corpses.

"Anderson!"

The line was dead again. Shepard broke into a jog, then a run, ignoring the stabs of pain that shot up her back each time her boots impacted the floor. The area closest to the precipice was relatively clear of bodies and she took advantage, covering more distance than she had since waking by the time the next faint shot rang out.

Ahead, the bulk of an enormous, tiered disk emerged from the darkness, jutting out into the emptiness beyond the pylon. Shepard sucked in air and urged herself forward. Unless the Reapers had altered more than just the anchoring arm's substructure, that was the base of the Presidium Tower and their best hope of opening the Citadel for the Crucible. The monolithic construct was more than just the seat of the Council; all of the station's environmental and logistical controls were routed through operation centers embedded in its core, a fact Sovereign itself had exploited while attempting to open the gateway.

Something moved in Shepard's peripheral vision and she stopped short, her rifle at her shoulder and angled towards the activity before she could even process it source. A body was rolling slowly down the face of a particularly large mass, its pale flesh noticeably bruised and mottled. The commander scanned the upper slope of the mound, and, seeing nothing that could have disturbed the corpse, edged sideways around a tangle of limbs that spilled almost to the edge of the abyss, her rifle trained on the place where she had first spotted movement. The corpse came to a halt half a meter from her feet but she ignored it – a faint rustling from beyond a ridge-like pile of dead marines was audible now, jarring against the morbid silence. Shepard emptied her lungs, tensed, and swung around the pile.

A squat, aphid-like creature was shuffling backwards down the mass of bodies on four, thin legs, two similarly delicate arms locked onto the legs of a human twice its size.

"A keeper," Shepard whispered, her weapon dipping.

The six-limbed insectoid planted each of its four feet in gaps in the mass and pulled. The action seemed to require little effort on the keeper's part, but Shepard heard the popping of dislocated bones before the body finally slid free of the press. When it was removed from the mound and spread out on the floor directly in Shepard's path, the keeper flipped the corpse on its back and began to run slender, pointed fingers over its throat, preferencing a swollen area under the chin where three small holes had been punched. The caretaker construct went about its task with the same quick and economical movements that Shepard remembered from hundreds of brief encounters, as at ease as if it was fiddling with a faulty conduit or minding a maintenance interface.

Shepard walked past the keeper and stepped carefully over the body. As she anticipated, the creature's compound eyes never left its work. There was a smell of decay about the human form, and Shepard noted that its skin was bruised and mottled. She still had no idea how the Reapers kept their harvest so well preserved, but the process was clearly imperfect.

As she left the keeper behind and began to pick up speed again, the commander wondered if the keeper and the others like it were still immune to the Reaper's command signals, adapted over millions of years to obey the Citadel and the Citadel alone.

Several bursts of weapons fire echoed through the vast, open chamber, distinctly to Shepard's right. The enormity of the Tower's base was close enough now that it dominated a full third of the artificial horizon, and some sort of wall or bulkhead loomed ahead at the edge of her vision, ending the precipice abruptly. Shepard looked for a path through the human remains closer at hand and found a wide gulf between two waist-high heaps. The density of bodies decreased as she moved further from the place she had awoken, and with fewer heaps of extinguished human life to obstruct her vision, the commander was beginning to gauge the scope of the slaughterhouse. It seemed to span the full length and width of the kilometers-long pylon, enough space for millions of harvested bodies, even tens of millions. The populations of entire colony worlds would have only filled a corner of it.

The commander had turned her lamp on and was running at the full speed her wounded thigh would allow, no longer agitated by the sound of blood splashing against her boots, when she began to notice figures in Cerberus uniforms scattered amongst the dead. A handful showed signs of advanced physical deformity like those at the Beam, but most were still human in stature. Some lay with weapons discarded at their feet or clutched in stiff hands, and to the last, they were covered in obvious marks of physical trauma, fresh and grievous. Shepard slowed when she spotted another keeper crouched over the wiry frame of a woman in an active camouflage suit. The infiltrator's own composite blade was jammed through her stomach and out of her back, but the keeper seemed to be more interested in something pinned beneath the corpse. As Shepard watched, it shoved the human remains aside and pulled free the torso of a husk, the weave of exposed conduits and brittle gray skin unmistakable.

Something behind Shepard moved. She swung about with her trigger finger tensed and scanned the terrain with the gun's spotlight, but she saw only dark blood and dead flesh. The commander turned a full 360 degrees before she moved away from the keeper, conscious again of the wet noise she sent echoing into the darkness with each forward movement. Her light bounced across the irregular terrain, casting faces and contorted limbs in stark and hideous relief. After another minute of silence, the pool of illumination ran up against something large and metallic – a Cerberus mech collapsed on its side, reinforced cockpit screen smashed and smeared with black.

The pile of stacked bodies nearest Shepard exploded, a half-dozen humanoid deadweights sent into the air by a tremendous impact. One hit her square in the chest and sent her rifle skittering away, its beam carving an erratic path through the darkness as it tumbled. Shepard found herself pinned against a rubbery mound, the mass of the figure that had impacted her now draped across her waist. She grabbed two handfuls of sodden fabric and pushed, finding the corpse far heavier than she would have expected.

Her rifle had landed on the floor several meters to the right and its lamp illuminated a long stretch of pooled blood. The body slid down to her knees and Shepard looked up at the light, in time to see a large shape break the beam and send red ripples down the rest of its course. Adrenaline pulsed and the commander kicked at the corpse with both legs. It dropped away with a dull thud and Shepard was up.

The omnitool on Shepard's wrist flashed to life and the blackness receded by a few paces. A humanoid shape loomed in front of her, bulging and indistinct in the soft, golden light. It surged forward with speed that belied its size, both arms hurtling downward like meteors, but the commander was already moving, wrapped in a head-over-heels dive that cleared her of the mound. Behind, there was another heavy concussion, the sound of pulping flesh and cracking bone. She buried her knee in the back of another of the bodies dislodged by the first impact and spun back, her pistol raised in both hands. The shape at the very edge of the omnitool's luminance, at least two meters tall and bulky. A spasm shook a hunk of meat free from the bristle of spikes that should have been one of the thing's hands and it jerked its face towards her.

Shepard saw the rounded black and gray of a Cerberus combat helmet hanging loose between corded shoulders, its neck seals crushed and cracked as though something had tried and failed to rip it away, and then the hulk was on her again. Four rounds punched into its center mass and the fifth shattered the remains of the helmet, revealing blue-gray eyes and a stiff, toothless mouth, edges peeled back into the cruel likeness of a grin. A nova of agony erupted from her right shoulder and she was falling, the sidearm gone. She hit the floor with most of the attacker's weight bearing down on her chest. The impact blinded her, filled her head with a roaring tide. Shepard couldn't breathe or move or think, felt a gasping scream rip out of her throat in a spatter of blood.

The crushing mass shifted and drew back. Shepard forced her eyes open and caught a glimpse of bare bone and studded metal through a field of field of starbursts and swimming motes. It was enough.

She squeezed her left hand and felt the heat flash of the omnitool's microfabricator blazing to life. The fist arced upward and she felt it impact the creature's jaw. A long, angular shard of molten metal glowed white hot against the gloom, its end buried in the side of a once-human skull. The face, half a meter from her own, sagged and for a moment something like relief flickered across its metal-etched features. Then the flash-forged blade shattered and the dark swallowed them up once again. Dead weight pressed Shepard back against the floor and any reserves she had left drained away.

* * *

Shepard had no way of knowing how long she lay there on the edge of consciousness, an island of pain in the sea of darkness. A voice somewhere in that desolation screamed at her, demanded that she stay awake, that she work herself free, but it was all she could do to keep air moving through her lungs. The ruined flesh on top of her was heavy, impossibly heavy, and her ribs pushed to the point of breaking with each inhalation.

With effort, she opened an eye and found a faint simmering of light at the edge of her vision.

The lamp.

She tried to turn her head towards it, but the movement sent a blast of agony from her shoulder up into her brain and she was teetering on the brink of cold oblivion again. The voice screamed against the encroaching clouds of thoughtlessness and she reached out, desperate for something to anchor her against the pain. To her surprise, the hand lying limp and aching to her left responded. It struggled under the bulk of the Cerberus creature, wedged between armor composite and sticky, wet metal. Straining, Shepard turn the flat of her palm upward and shoved.

The rending pain returned but this time she did not let it stop her. Wrist and arm buckled under the strain and still she pushed. The weight bore down on her, immovable, and still she pushed.

There was movement around her, a faint rustle. Shepard barely comprehended it, knew that if she stopped pushing she would never start again.

Something brushed lightly against her hair, and the hulk began to shift. Shepard gasped and bent what of her own weight she could against it. Her left shoulder rebelled against the exertion, but she did not relent, and with a shuddering crash, she was free.

Shepard lay back on the blood-slick surface, letting her chest rise and fall free for a time, unable to do anything but listen to her own beating heart and the rasp of air escaping her lips. A delicate shuffling sound filled the air under her heavy breathing, and as her lungs fell back into a normal rhythm, she recognized it. One-handed, she reengaged her omnitool's holographic display and urged the hand up a few centimeters.

Three keepers were clustered around the Cerberus creature, peeling back its ill-fitting armor and testing the corrupted flesh underneath with quick jabs of their slender fingers. Once they were satisfied, two of the constructs grasped the thing by its legs and began to drag it off into the gloom, shifting the mass of flesh and synthetics like it was a sack of used filaments. The third lingered for a moment, scanning the surrounding corpses with its huge, jet eyes. It stopped on her last and she bent towards it laboriously, trying to meet its gaze.

"Thanks."

The keeper disappeared after its companions, giving no sign that had even heard the word.

Shepard sank back onto her shoulder blades, wincing. She knew that the keepers were little more than organic, ambulatory omnitools, their behaviors completely defined by whatever presets and protocols that the Reapers had imprinted on them when they were first set to maintain the Citadel, but Shepard was finding it harder and harder to think of machines as simple instruments. If nothing else, the keepers had deemed that her biomass was still adequate, and that was something.

_Jack was right_, Shepard thought as unconsciousness finally claimed her. _I've got a talent for making strange friends._

* * *

The scent of leather and citrus drew Shepard from a dream of shadows and walking death.

She felt strong, armored arms under her back and her legs and the swinging rhythm of another's stride. Someone was carrying her.

"Where did you find her?"

Shepard felt the grating of a broken rib each time she drew in breath, and the back of her thigh still burned from its wound, but the thought-rending pain of her right shoulder was all but gone, replaced by a deep numbness that stretched to the tips of her fingers. She tried to flex the muscles of the arm, just to make sure that the limb was still there, and was rewarded by a dull ache that told her it was. Still, there was no movement.

"Two hundred meters into the chamber. I wouldn't have seen her at all if her rifle's combat light hadn't been on when she dropped it. I put some medigel on the shoulder to seal it, but... did a medic make it up?"

"No, I'm sorry. Come on, you can set her down in that bay over there. I'll see what I can do about finding a trauma pack."

The musky smell tickled at Shepard's nose again and she opened her eyes. A turian face was less than a meter from hers, his skin gray in the dim light. She took in the visage for a moment before speaking, the coarse skin of the scar that ran up his jaw and mandible, the deep blue and simple geometry of his face paint, the ocular headset that he wore like he had been born with it.

"You're sweating, Garrus," she said. "Busy day?"

Garrus jerked to a halt and Shepard felt her back begin to slip out from between his arms before he caught himself.

"Shepard! I didn't... are you..." Garrus' mandibles flattened against his face and his back straightened, the turian-stoic-discipline posture he put on when he was startled, but the relief in his tone was impossible to disguise. "I mean... this is the second time I've had to carry you off of a battlefield today, Shepard. Anymore and they'll have to deliver my medals to me with a forklift."

"I see you're still just using me to advance your career, Vakarian."

Shepard ran her left hand along Garrus' crest and then grabbed the raised rim that ran between the shoulder plates of his armor.

"Now, let me down."

"I'm not sure if that's a good idea," Garrus said quickly, but the commander was already sliding free of his arms. There was pain when her feet hit the ground, but the sudden feeling of vertigo that overwhelmed her for a moment was far worse, and she was forced to cling to the turian's side as the world righted itself.

"I'm all right. Just give me a moment."

They were standing in some kind of open courtyard, at least a hundred meters in width but given the feel of a canyon by the immensity of its surroundings. It was bordered to one side by the slaughterhouse and the high-ceilinged chamber that contained it; even from a distance, darkness and oppressive scale made the dimensions of each difficult to grasp. A sheer cliff of smooth, gray metal formed the opposing boundary, so tall that looking up at it wracked Shepard with another wave of disorientation. Rather than sky, the distant, angry glow of the Citadel's arms filled the space above, casting everything beneath in dusky red.

An assortment of shuttles and light troop carriers were clustered in a semi-circle against the base of the cliff, a structure that Shepard knew could only be Presidium Tower. Several of the ships arranged around her were smashed and melted beyond recognition, but the others still seemed to be relatively intact, their access hatches open to reveal empty benches and disengaged cargo clamps. The hull of each was neutral, white or black painted metal, unadorned save for bullet pockmarks and energy scarring, but Shepard knew Cerberus hardware when she saw it. There were the bodies, too, scattered at the outskirts of the landing zone, Cerberus combat suits intermingled with the dark carapace of husks and other Reaper monstrosities.

Anderson and a handful of Alliance soldiers in damaged and blood-stained gear emerged from behind the largest transport, a sleek, multi-tiered vessel parked horizontally against the face of the Tower.

"I was just about to tuck you in, Shepard," the admiral said. He was smiling, but his sagging brow and hard-set jaw were far from cheerful. "Should you be on your feet? You look more than a little beaten up."

Shepard forced herself to let go of Garrus and bit the inside of her lip as muscles from neck to toe screamed in protest.

"No worse than you, Admiral. I can hold it together until we evac." She inclined her head towards the nearest shuttle. "It looks like the Illusive Man was even kind enough to provide us with our own way out, assuming we can get those arms open."

Anderson nodded.

"Some of them might still be space-worthy, but we haven't had time to do a thorough check, just enough to be sure they're all clear. This explains where all those things at the Beam came from, but I'm still not sure why they're here at all. Didn't you say that Cerberus bastard gave himself up to the Reapers when he let them in on the Crucible?"

"I don't think just throwing up his hands and becoming a Reaper plaything was ever his plan," Shepard said. "He wasn't exactly a mood to lay out the specifics the last time we spoke. Whatever's going on, it's got the Reapers off-balance."

A small, weary band was gathering around them. Humans made up most of it, men and women with dinted helmets cradled in their arms and deep shadows under their eyes, but a salarian stood with them as well, supporting his weight on one of the long, spindly anti-personnel rifles favored by the Special Tasks Group. A krogan crouched on the other side of the group, a raw, jagged rent where his right eye used to be, and a male quarian stood next to him, arms crossed. They were eleven, all told, and none of them were in fighting shape.

"We're it," Anderson said. "Everyone who made it through the Beam and out of that place. I stayed at the exit aperture as long as I could for reinforcements, but there were more hostiles in the vicinity. Not many, but we had to break and make for the objective when we started taking casualties."

"Enemy forces are spread pretty thin up here," Garrus said, handing her one of his sidearms. She took it with her left and sighted along its barrel one-handed. "I ran into few after I came to somewhere in there, but they were too busy fighting other husks to take much notice. Hopefully, Sword's got the same kind of competition. My comms have been spotty since the Beam."

Shepard nodded and slipped the pistol into her hip holster.

"We've got to assume Hackett's still waiting to bring Crucible in. Admiral, do we have a way into the Tower?"

"The Illusive Man covered that, too," Anderson said. "Come on, I'll show you."

He gestured to a pair of marines and they fell in beside him as he made for the largest transport. Shepard hung back for a moment.

"Anyone short on ammo? The Reapers haven't been able to stop us from getting this far, and I'm not about to have someone's empty clip do the job for them."

There were a few shaken heads and murmurs, and several of the soldiers exchanged thermal charges and grenades. Shepard heard no tense banter, no cursing or praying or pats on the back, no indication that anything was keeping them going but ingrained discipline and survival instinct. Harbinger and what had lain beyond the Beam would have pushed anyone to the breaking point. There wasn't much a few words could do to lessen that weight, but she had to try.

"I don't have to tell you who we've lost today. There's no forgetting them, and I'd never ask any of you to try, even for a moment. All I want you to do is remember that there are still people fighting down on Earth, and on Sur'Kesh, and on Tuchanka. On every world that the Reapers haven't consumed, there is still life. We are not alone. And when this day is through, if we see this thing to the end, there won't be anything left to fight."

There was no cheering or applause, and Shepard hadn't expected any, but a few of the ragged band had pulled out of their own heads enough to look her in the eyes as she spoke. It was something.

She nodded at Garrus and he inclined his head in response.

"All right, let's get some guns in cover." Garrus broke from the circle and began pointing at Cerberus craft. "There, there, and there. I want a sniper covering the main approaches, and explosives on hand by that wreck, the furthest one out. If they come hard, they'll have to clear that first."

Shepard caught up with Anderson as he was rounding the transport. Like the other ships, its cargo doors were wide open, and by the size and configuration of the bay within, it had offloaded more than just troops.

"From the blast marks, Cerberus had to force its way in," Anderson said, indicating to a point at the base of the artificial cliff. "Somehow, I doubt that the Reapers would have needed to bother."

Sheltered to one side by the transport's forward compartment, a section of the wall was blackened and melted, the flooring around it strewn with rubble. A square hole yawned at the center of the destruction, three meters by three meters. It looked like first part of the space within the breach had been carved out of solid metal with great effort, but after a few paces it opened up into a cleaner and more orderly chamber, lit by strings of excavation lights.

The four of them moved inside slowly, weapons in hand and combat lamps engaged, even with the guide lights ahead.

"I take it you haven't had time to check this place for booby traps or a rear guard?" Shepard said.

"Just a quick scan," Anderson replied. "We'll just have to hope that the Illusive Man was in as much of a hurry as we are, wherever he was headed."

The inner chamber was strangely mundane given the carnage and ancient vastness just outside. A path had been cleared through the middle of the room for whatever Cerberus had moved from the transport and there were holes blown in two of its walls, but otherwise the space was a standard office area, from the rows of data terminals and padded chairs to the automated coffee dispenser that lay overturned in one corner. There were no bodies, but that wasn't surprising. Even though the station had been taken utterly by surprise, the Council would have had time to issue an alert and evacuate non-essential personnel to hardened shelters... collection points the Reapers had likely built into the Citadel explicitly for that purpose.

Shepard nudged a discarded datapad with her foot and her thoughts wandered to Commander Bailey and the other C-Sec officers she knew, saw their faces on bodies buried deep the mounds of prepared flesh or drifting frozen in hard vacuum. Armando, at least, would have died with a gun in his hand.

"I guess the Reapers didn't have much time to finish purging the place," Anderson said as he eyed the cabinets and blank viewscreens that lined the walls.

"I'm not sure that they reached this part of the station at all," Shepard replied, kicking the datapad away. "It's a big tower. Let's see where we are."

The office opened into a wide, two-storied hallway that might have evoked an outdoor plaza if it hadn't been so dark and devoid of life. More strings of portable illuminators lit the right-hand length of the corridor at intervals, and Shepard could make out the outlines of dozens of other doors, some of them marked with compact, precise lettering in a number of languages. As they approached the first light, she could make out a few signs in English: Maintenance Area, No Entry Without Authorization, Observation Suite 008-24.

"I should be able to pull a location from that, Commander." One of the marines accessed the station schematics that had been loaded onto the omnitools of every member of Hammer. "Wait one. All right, looks like we're in one of the main operations areas. There's a control hub near the center of the level, straight two hundred meters and then another two hundred to the left."

"That hub is plugged directly into the Citadel's primary systems," Anderson said. "If we can't open the arms there, we won't be able to do it anywhere."

"And it's a good bet that that's where Cerberus was headed." Shepard tried to move her right arm, grimaced, and activated her transceiver with her left. "Garrus, do you read me? We've got a fix on the target and a probable on the Illusive Man. Get everyone into the Tower. We might need every gun for this one."

There was no response. When a repeat transmission yielded the same result, Shepard turned to one of their escorts and was about to send him back to the landing zone when a flurry of muffled sounds echoed down the hallway from the direction of the tunnel.

Shepard's ear crackled.

"Garrus, what's your status?" she shouted over the interference.

"Contact! Again, we've got contact! Husks, cannibals, definitely not Cerberus this time! They aren't..." The turian faded out briefly. "... a lot of them! We can hold this position for now, but they'll be all over us if we let go of the kill zone. Find that control room and get the Citadel unlocked, Shepard! We'll keep them off your back as long as we can!"

Again, his voice dissolved into incoherent background noise. A persistent patter of gunfire emanated from the blasted office door, layered over other sounds, baleful and animalistic.

Shepard's hand dropped from her ear and she stared back down the corridor for a few moments. She knew Garrus was making the right choice, and that the landing area was a more defensible position than others that he had held before, but still...

The eyes of the marines were on her back, and she could feel their uncertainty grow with each second that passed. Even Anderson was silent, waiting on her lead. Fist clenched, the commander turned and began to walk towards the next bubble of light. She felt strength returning to her legs as the others moved to match her pace, and soon all of them wre running. The admiral behind quickly, his limp adding a dissonance to their pounding footfalls, but he made no complaint and they reached the fork in the hallway more quickly than Shepard would have believed possible.

The rumble of an explosion rippled after them as they were turning, but they had come too far to even consider turning back. The new passage was nearly as wide and high as the main one, but it had only the single level and rose at gradual intervals, broad steps that angled towards a distant point of light. The illuminators were gone and Shepard had to rely on the soldiers flanking her to highlight the steps as they surged forward. The walls to either side closed in on them, marked by fewer and fewer side passages and doorways, and the commander realized that an indoctrinated trooper with the aim of a hanar could probably take them out with little trouble if he was positioned at the end of the hallway.

Light filled Shepard's field of vision, but no bullets flew in their direction, no garbled voices called for backup or screamed with half-sentient rage. Two figures resolved against the glare and Shepard trained her pistol on the closest, but she saw immediately that neither was moving. Both were clad in white and black assault gear and slumped against opposite walls, their bulky combat shields and heavy repeaters discarded some distance away, as though they had been thrown. Neither man was bloated like the one that had nearly crushed her, but glowing cables and organic wiring boiled from breaches in their face plates and under their arms like wet roots. The tendrils seemed to be growing into the walls and floor, a carpet of biomechanical ivy that already covered much of the corridor's final stretch. Shepard slowed as she passed the motionless things, careful not touch the growth.

As the commander's eyes adjusted to the brightness, a faint and sourceless feeling of disorientation began to tug at the back of her skull.

The hub was a circular chamber more than twice the diameter of the _Normandy_'s war room. Little remained of the facility that Council personnel had operated there for thousands of years; most of the floor tiling had been ripped out and dumped in heaps against the encircling wall, smashed ceramic and sheet metal mingled with whole banks of data displays and shattered screens. Positioned amidst the wreckage, four huge floodlights converged on the center of the room, where a tangled mass of machinery taller than a human being sprawled, organic form composed of artificial components. Shepard had enough time to take in several thick bundles of cabling fused to the exposed understructure of the hub, an expanse of the same stark, pale material that covered the Tower's edifice. Then, another knot of conduits shifted and she saw the human being attached to the end of it.

"You never fail to impress, Shepard."

The Illusive Man turned from an array of flickering projections and appraised the commander with eyes that shone almost as brightly as the floodlights trained on the enormous device. His ocular prosthetics had been removed or simply transformed, replaced by featureless globes of electric blue, and filaments of black, carbon-infused skin etched their way horizontally from the corners of his eyes. Two suspended cables sprouted from between his shoulder blades and entwined behind his head before arcing back into the mass of networked mechanisms. The tubes glistened with something wet and repositioned with wide, jerking movements when the Illusive Man took a step forward and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

"I never expected that Leng would defeat you a second time, but to reach me here? You set back my timetable again and again, and still I underestimated your resolve. Oh, well. A final error in judgment, and one that won't cost me."

"That's something else your wrong about," Shepard said. "There's no rationalizing or forgiving the things you've done, and I'm going to make sure you answer for them. Right here, right now."

There were more dead Cerberus agents bonded to the floor around the machine, little more than metallic vines coiling from ragged engineering uniforms.

The Illusive Man smiled, utterly unfazed by the threat.

"Now that I think of it, I'm quite glad that you've come. I know that you've never appreciated my goal for what it truly is, Shepard, but I've always appreciated yours. You've fought for humanity's survival from the moment I brought you back from the dead, and you deserve to see our triumph firsthand."

"How is humanity served by this?" Shepard moved forward and aimed her pistol directly at the Illusive Man's forehead. "Tell me! You know better than anyone how many people were killed on Horizon. You knew what would happen if the Reapers learned that we had discovered the Catalyst's location, and you brought them down on the Citadel anyways. Millions of humans have been slaughtered by your order, and billions more may die because of what you've done!"

The smile faded from the Illusive Man's lips, but he didn't so much as glance at the gun.

"Do you think I enjoy watching our people die, Shepard? Even you can't be that blind. Yes, I've made sacrifices. People have died because of me, innocent people, too many people. But I did it so the rest of humanity wouldn't follow them into that fate, or a worse one. What is the lesson of the protheans, Shepard? The rachnai? The krogan? Civilizations fall, and their populations are either enslaved or exterminated. It's happened time and time again, and not just because of the Reapers. You've sacrificed people to save ships and planets, Commander. How many more would you give up to save our entire species, for all time?"

Anderson stepped up behind Shepard.

"We don't have time for this, Commander. The Crucible can't wait."

"Ah yes, the Crucible." The Illusive Man inclined his head toward Anderson. "Something else I'm grateful for. You saved me the trouble of hunting it down, or having to construct my own. The plan couldn't be completed without it."

"Enough!" Anderson raised his rifle to his shoulder. "Men, rip him out of that thing. Blow him out of it if you have to."

The Illusive Man simply smiled again, and there was something in his expression that made Shepard turn towards the marines.

One was on his knees, a hand spread across the face of his helmet as though he was trying to keep something from escaping it. The other stood with his face bare, staring blank-eyed at a point on the ceiling as he mouthed a single word over and over again. The muzzle of his rifle was flush against the kneeling man's head. As Shepard watched, the helmeted marine raised his own weapon one-handed and pressed it to his companion's stomach.

"I won't let it," he said, frozen in place save for his firing arm. "I won't let it in. I won't."

Shepard tried to move forward, could see herself knocking one of the men to the floor, could feel herself wrenching the weapon from the other man, disarming him with her right hand.

Her right hand.

She focused on the arm, felt the dull ache and unresponsive muscle, and then she was standing where she had been an instant before, still transfixed by the marines. Anderson was motionless as well, his rifle dipping in a crystallized moment of confusion.

"What do you..."

Two simultaneous gunshots and the hiss of overloaded kinetic barriers drowned out Anderson's shout. The kneeling marine collapsed face first onto the floor plating, but the other teetered for a moment before he began to fall, his mouth still working. Shepard was moving before he hit the floor, actually moving, and she felt herself fire a round straight into the Illusive Man's sneering mouth, saw the splatter and the dimming the dimming of his eyes.

_Stop! _

She blinked and the world realigned. Anderson was in front of her now, and her pistol was leveled at his forehead. He stared past the weapon as though he hadn't fully processed it, utterly still, his face contorted with confusion and half-formed rage. Shepard could feel her trigger finger tensed against the metal firing tab, the barest pressure from activation.

"The lives lost at the Sanctuary research facility were not spent for my amusement," the Illusive Man said, his voice sharp with condescension. "Unlocking the Reaper control signal was the overriding objective, of course, but Mr. Lawson's experiments also yielded a tremendous amount of information on the processes involved in indoctrination. There's nothing mystical about the means by which the Reapers subvert organic minds, not even anything telepathic. It's accomplished through the precise and subtle modulation of ultrasonic frequencies. Sound, Shepard, sound is all we need to bend any and every alien species to our will."

The Illusive Man strolled into Shepard's field of vision and passed between Anderson and the gun, just centimeters from its muzzle. The tubes bobbed after him like the strings of some macabre marionette.

"Of course, this sort of control, so rapid and complete, is well beyond anything I ever thought was possible before coming to this structure. The very material in the walls here acts as some sort of resonator, amplifying and focusing my indoctrination protocols. What normally requires days or weeks of constant exposure to Reaper artifacts I can accomplish in minutes, and that's just the start of it! The indoctrination frequencies transmitted within the tower accelerate the rate of biosynthetic augmentation nearly a thousandfold, facilitating the assimilation of the external mass necessary to flash-fabricate superior soldiers from organics with only light Reaper modifications. The troopers I set to guard the Beam and the tower perimeter were only dry runs. Think what we, all humans, could become when this technology is fully researched and implemented!"

Even though the rest of her body was lost to her, Shepard found that she could speak with only minimal effort. He wanted to hear what she had to say.

"And what about the dry runs back in the hallway and around our feet? Your soldiers and your scientists? Were they not human enough for this evolution of yours?"

The shadow of something flickered across the Illusive Man's face, but it was gone again by the time he opened his mouth to respond.

"The transformation process is... intense, and I didn't adapt to my own implantation quickly enough to moderate it for the first effected individuals. There will be plenty of time to perfect application of the resonance when the control signal has finished subjugating the Reapers in this system. That's the priority right now."

"Can't you see what you're doing?" Shepard struggled to keep her tone calm. "Those monsters out there? They aren't human anymore. How is what you did to them, what you're doing to us right now, any different from what Harbinger and the rest did to Earth? Are you going to start harvesting human biomass, too?"

The burning orbs that had once been eyes narrowed behind blackened lids.

"Reasoning with you was always pointless. Very well. I'll show you first-hand what I've done for humanity, and you will understand."

"And if I don't?"

"You will, Shepard. Even your fortress of self-righteousness can't withstand the power of this place if I turn it fully against you."

A spasm shook Anderson and his mouth wrenched open, agony raging behind his eyes. The words that belted from his throat were guttural and half-formed, barely recognizable as his own.

"Don't. Let. Him. Change. You."

The Illusive Man glanced at him and stepped clear of Shepard's line of fire.

"I think the admiral had best join his men. This demonstration is just for the two of us."

Shepard's finger depressed and a wave of light and heat exploded across Anderson's chest. He remained absolutely still as his skin-tight shield flickered about his upper body, then faded from visual spectrum. The second shot sent sparks racing across skin and cloth as the kinetic barrier overloaded, and this time Anderson staggered back half a step from the impact. His chin jerked up, but those eyes were still locked on hers.

_No! _

Shepard felt fire rip down her back, as though her spinal column had ignited and burst through her skin. An intense feeling of generalized movement and an even more intense burst of pain overwhelmed her senses, and for an instant, she was certain that the Illusive Man had tired of the puppet show and transmitted some sort of organic kill code. But her vision cleared rather than darkening, and she saw that Anderson was still standing in front of her, blood beginning to well from a spot on his waist. The gun, still clutched in her left hand, was angled down from where she had aimed it for the first two shots, even though she could not remember it moving.

"That shouldn't be..."

The Illusive Man caught himself quickly, but Shepard heard something in those words she had never encountered in all of their previous interactions.

Doubt.

The Illusive Man had shown her annoyance and curiosity, pride and anger, but his air of smug self-assurance had never before wavered.

He was looking at her, probing deep with those spheres of light, and she began to wonder what they were actually seeing.

"It must be the prothean cipher. Its impact on your neurochemistry was never fully accounted for." He turned his head towards the center of the chamber and inclined his head slightly, considering. "All right, Shepard. The admiral can join us for whatever amount of time you've left him with. Now, if you'll allow me a moment, the control signal has almost completed its cycle and we need to be in position for the final transmission burst."

Shepard felt herself toss the pistol away and then her body was hers again. The sudden surge of reactivity sent her sprawling face first onto the floor. She let the normal flow of sensation and response realign in her mind until her heartbeat began to slow, testing her extremities just to make sure that they were actually hers and relishing the fresh waves of agony radiating from her wounds.

When she finally looked up, the Illusive Man was hunched over his holographic displays, his back conduits swaying with each small movement. Anderson lay next to her, hunched over a slow-spreading pool of blood. His eyes were open and one arm was outstretched. Biting back the pain, Shepard took his hand in hers.

"I... expected better aim than that from you," he whispered.

Shepard edged closer and pulled herself into a sitting position.

"How bad is it?"

"Didn't hit anything vital, I think." He tried to fight back a cough and failed. "Just need to get some pressure on it to stop the bleeding."

Shepard twisted around to get at one of her hip compartments and dug out her last trauma patch. She took an end in her teeth and slowly guided the admiral onto his back. The bullet had clipped the lower edge of his chest plate and buried itself just under his ribcage, punching easily through the unshielded fabric of his combat vest. One-handed, Shepard ripped a hole in the bloody weave and pressed the patch against the seeping puncture beneath, applying as much pressure as she dared. Anderson gasped and clenched his hands into fists, but Shepard maintained contact for a full twenty-count. If the patch formed a seal, the infused medigel solution would begin to numb the pain, but that would only happen if she could stem the bleeding.

A light tremor shook the floor, followed swiftly by a muffled clank and rumble that emanated from beyond the enclosing wall. The sound resounded upward into the ceiling, but even as it faded away, a fresh vibration radiated through the surface beneath them. Seams manifested in the wall's smooth surface and it pulled away in quarter segments, sloughing cascades of rubble into the widening gap. Careful to keep her hand clasped to Anderson's side, Shepard looked toward the Illusive Man, but his back was still turned to them and he seemed to be completely engrossed in the machine.

Anderson's hand pushed against her left sleeve.

"Stop him, Commander." His voice was thin, almost lost in the mounting vibration. "Whatever he's managed to do, whatever he shows you, it's not worth the price."

Shepard's stomach dropped before she could respond, flattening against her groin as it did during high-speed combat extractions. They were moving up. She looked towards the ceiling in time to see it slide away with the wall segments, and then the circle of gutted flooring was hurtling up a vertical shaft. The inner mass of the tower shifted and compressed as they rose, creating empty space instants before they passed through it and sending shattered pieces of plated insulation and mangled fragments of technology raining down on the platform. Somewhere in the rearranging mass of superstructure, a public concourse tipped up and flattened against the wall of the shaft, sending an eight-meter tall granite statue tipping through the air directly above the Illusive Man and his machine. At ten meters, it exploded into hunks of white stone, dashed against a kinetic barrier that deflected the impact with barely a stress shimmer. The commander caught a quick glimpse of the statue's head as it fell away, a stern and stylized asari face, heavily cracked by the destruction of its body.

The tower was freeing itself of millennia of habitation as easily as an animal shook away a coating of mud.

The barrier didn't stop more rubble from falling away from the platform as it continued the ascent, and the floodlights began to tumble off with the dusty tide. When the last vanished over the side, Shepard realized that something else was lighting the shaft. A slash of red split the far surface as it rushed by, thin but widening by the second. Pulses of illumination washed over the platform, and in their sanguine glow she watched as the entire wall drew back and integrated with the shifting mass to behind her.

"Anderson..."

There was no response. Shepard looked down at the admiral and saw that his eyes were closed. Gingerly, she lifted her blood-caked hand from his side and found that the trauma patch was bonded to his skin, firm and watertight. The hand moved up to his neck and she located his carotid artery, waited as crimson engulfed them both.

Clearing the upper edge of a retreating wall segment, the platform emerged from the shaft and shot up an indent in the tower's tapering exterior. Void and artificial vastness loomed at every other angle, the ravages of hard vacuum held back by the same unseen shield that maintained the human biomass far below. At the apogee of the metal sky, a vortex of crackling, undulating light fulminated in place of a star, swelling to a blinding intensity and then releasing its collected energy in an electric wave down the surfaces of each of the five ward arms. Dark masses of geometry that had once been city blocks and sprawling dock assemblies stood out like missing teeth on a bare, red skull as the pulse washed over them.

"As you can see, the Citadel has reached maximum energy output." The Illusive man didn't speak up over the vibration of the platform or even turn away from his displays, but she heard him as though he was talking with her own throat. "The amount of power flowing those arms is incredible, more than enough to obliterate any parasitic external structures and kill all lifeforms still in the wards – assuming any survived the initial environmental systems shutdown."

Shepard stood slowly and found that keeping her balance was easier than she had expected. They were decelerating.

"Your doing, I assume? Another unfortunate sacrifice?"

"A necessary stalling tactic. After I let the Catalyst data fall into their grasp, the Reapers took the Citadel almost immediately and without their normal thoroughness, just as anticipated – my team was able to slip inside undetected while they eliminated the Council's defenses and moved the station through the local mass relay. When the Reapers began pooling their harvest and moved to consolidate their hold on this construct, I was forced to interface with logistical control and distract them until the control transmitter was fully installed. Blowing the habitation zones into space accomplished that effectively, and had the added benefit of reducing the number of indoctrinated forces within the station. Until I access the Citadel's full power capacity, this device is only able to disrupt communication between the prime Reapers and their servants – having a full-strength army of husks breathing down my neck didn't factor well into the final stage of the plan."

The platform eased to a halt and socketed itself into the end of a broad, downcurved slope. They had reached to the tower's apex, and nothing stood between Shepard and the Citadel's interlocked extremities but kilometers of cold, dead space.

Seeing that the Illusive Man's back was still turned, Shepard took a few steps towards the slope and looked down. The landscape of smooth, light-hued metal curved gradually for several hundred meters before dropping away and merging with the tower's sheer flanks. A raised, cavern-like opening emerged from the base of each side of the slope, designed to accommodate the secondary appendages of a Reaper capital ship, judging by their shape and size.

"I don't recommend an escape attempt, Shepard," the Illusive Man said, turning from the machine with a wide flourish of his suspended tubes. "You wouldn't make it far without my containment field, and there are still husks lurking on the upper levels of the tower. I wasn't able to purge them all. Besides, you've got a front row seat to the most important moment in human history. Why waste it?"

Shepard stepped away from the edge of the platform and looked back. On the gutted floor near the tendriled machine, she caught a glimpse of something angular and metallic.

"Reapers aren't husks," she said, quickly matching the Illusive Man's piercing gaze. "What makes you so sure that they can controlled, even with the Catalyst powering that machine? Every time someone has tried to use their technology they've been enslaved or destroyed by it. What makes you so different?"

"Vision, Shepard. Vision, and careful planning. I've spent half of my life working towards this moment. I know the technology, and I know my own mind. This is what I was born to do."

Behind him, panels lining the side of the device's boxy core component opened and extended silver filaments into the air. The low humming emanating from the machine ramped up in volume and pitch and sparks of the same dark red energy pulsing down the station's length began to jump between the exposed transmitters.

"Now, watch the birth of a human universe."


	3. Chapter 3

The Citadel's five arms shuddered in unison and began to open. Wedges of glimmering starfield appeared and expanded as the soaring vault split and drew back, and Shepard caught a glimpse of Sol, dazzlingly brilliant after the murky reds and blacks of the Reapers' domain. Then Earth filled her field of view, water and landmass alike obscured by night and huge expanses of turbulent cloud cover. Sunlight only touched the very edge of the curvature Shepard could see, the barest sliver of blue and brown.

Shepard's heart pounded in her chest. She had seen the world like this before, a hundred times from this angle and in this light. Nightmare after nightmare, vision after vision, and now she understood. It had never been just some dead prothean world, lost and forgotten. From the first moment, the beacon had been showing her Earth.

"You're fleet has fought admirably."

The Illusive Man gestured to a melee of lights between the planet's dark mass and the Citadel's receding arms. Most of the orbital combat theater was just a wide mass of vague movement marked occasionally by the flashes of exploding ordinance and dying capital ships, but one flank of the battle was close enough that Shepard could actually make out the shape of individual starships, if only by the flaring of their barriers and weapons. The detail of Sword's vanguard was lost, human cruiser, asari dreadnaught, and geth gunship all indistinguishable, silvery motes, but the clawed profile and lashing beams of Reapers were unmistakable. The commander could make out dozens of the kilometers-long capital ships, but even they were dwarfed by the vessel at the heart of the battle – the great sphere of the Crucible, more like a moon in scale and shape than an artificial construct.

"Even with their communications disrupted, there was a good chance that the Reaper armada would wipe them out before my signal was primed."

Shepard walked slowly towards the Illusive Man. A quick downward glance as she moved marked the spot she had noticed before, confirmed the handle of her discarded pistol where it protruded from a drift of pulverized floor tiles.

"But they _are_ still in the fight," she said. "Every person out there has suffered and compromised and sacrificed to get this far, but they haven't had to give up what they are. They're fighting to defeat the Reapers, not become them. You've already done what I came here to do. The Citadel is open. Just let them move the Crucible into position, and we can end this, forever."

The Illusive Man smiled again.

"As I said before, Shepard, I have every intention of letting the Crucible reach us. It's an asset, and now I have the perfect means of protecting it."

The symbols and readings flickering across the device's screens vanished, replaced by a visual representation of the same waveform. The holographic band began to undulate and more fluctuating patterns layered on top of it, the contours and movements of each slightly different. Beyond, thrust wide into interplanetary space, the inner surfaces of the ward arms glowed as though the entire structure was melting from the inside, and arcs of energy lashed through the void between them. Shepard knew that there would be no audible sound, that the signal could not be sonic in nature, but something still rose at the edge of her consciousness, thousands upon thousands of voices whispering until that whispering became a wordless roar.

She staggered and felt herself tipping forward, but a hand shot out to steady her. The Illusive Man was still looking at her, still smiling. She wanted to recoil, to rip out of his grasp and wrap her hands around his carbon-streaked neck, but...

"It's done," he said. "Look."

Hundreds of kilometers away, an explosion flared like a nova in the middle of the combat zone, and then the constant, scattered flashing subsided. For a few more seconds, points of light continued to flicker into being and vanish, missile detonations and mass accelerator slugs finding their marks, but soon those ceased as well, and the riot of flickering radiance faded away into the blackness of space.

"My ships have ceased fire."

The Illusive Man's eyes closed and he tilted his head backwards, the hard lines of his face softened into an almost blissful expression.

"This feeling, I can't even begin... I didn't know it would be so perfect. So clear. I can hear their thoughts, Shepard. I can touch every part of them, do anything that they can do. And... they are capable of so much!"

His hand fell away from Shepard and she backed away, moved until she felt her heel come down on the trigger guard of the pistol. The Illusive Man stood transfixed, motionless save for the slow swaying of his connective tubes. She kept both eyes trained on him as she activated her ear transceiver.

"Sword, this is Commander Shepard. Does anyone copy?"

The reply came almost immediately, tinged by only the slightest undertone of static.

"Normandy here." There was an unusual tightness in Joker's tone. "Damned glad to hear your voice, ma'am."

"Same to you, Joker. I need a status report on the fleet."

"Holding together, barely. We took a beating keeping the Crucible clear of fire and we're down to half strength, maybe less. Hackett's ship took a hit during the last push... not as bad as it could be, but his comms are offline."

"And the Reapers?" Shepard asked.

"They've been letting us run circles around them, probably the only reason anyone's still here to chat, but now... I thought we actually had to plug the Crucible into the Citadel, not just bring it within hand-waving distance."

Shepard looked from the Illusive Man to the distant fleets to the gun at her feet.

"Stand by, Joker."

The Illusive Man opened his eyes again and raised his right hand in front of the burning globes, turning it forward and back.

"To think how long we've been constrained by this, bound by flesh and all its vulnerability. With the same thought that moves this hand, I can cross star systems and raze continents. And their minds, the knowledge stored there... You must have an inkling of this power, Shepard. You've spoken with them, touched their consciousness. How could you know what it is to be them and not want to share in that existence?"

Shepard swallowed and tried to keep her voice calm.

"Listen to what you're saying. All of this is for humanity's sake, isn't it? What does sharing in the Reapers' existence have to do with that?"

The spheres of light switched to her and the Illusive Man's lips drew back. It was not another smile or a look of annoyance, nor any of the other restrained expressions that Shepard had become accustomed to over the course of their conversations. This was a snarl, a burst of unadulterated rage.

"It has everything to do with humanity! Only perfect beings can endure in this universe. We deserve to become perfect, we need to! And they... the Reapers... they are..."

The Illusive Man stumbled, as though his tongue could no longer form the words he need it to. He reached for the back of his neck, just above the point where the tubes were fused to his skin, and began to scratch.

Shepard's ear crackled.

"One of the flanks is moving again, Shepard. A capital ship and a few destroyers, headed for the center of the Citadel. It might be... Hold on. I'm getting an attack order from the Destiny Ascension. They want to press the advantage while the rest of the Reapers are still incapacitated."

Both of the Illusive Man's hands were at his neck now, worrying the tube sealed with rough, distracted motions.

"There are so many voices," he said, and it seemed to Shepard that he was no longer talking to her. "I just need a moment to bring them into alignment. The signal worked perfectly, the safeguards are perfect. More time. Just a little more time to bring it together."

Something glimmered in the void at the upper edge of Shepard's vision, and sight and movement coalesced into a single moment of sensation. A chain of explosions against the blackness. Daggers of light whipping out from the point of detonation. Joker shouting in her ear. The Illusive Man on his knees, eye globes searing with yellowish light. Her left hand dipping to the floor, coming up with the sidearm, aiming.

An impact shook the platform and Shepard tore her gaze away from the Illusive Man's wracked form in time to see Sol's light disappeared behind a shadowed vastness. For an instant, she assumed that the Citadel's arms were sealing once more, but then six golden stars burst into existence barely a hundred meters above her.

Harbinger spoke, and the tower resonated with the words.

"Organic hardware is insufficient."

The Illusive Man cringed away from the cold radiance of the Reaper's eyes and fell backward, tangling with the suspended tubes joined to his spine. He struggled with them for a moment before falling limp and allowing the strands to hold his torso a few centimeters off of the ground.

"You can't be here," he said, the thin, wavering voice almost unrecognizable . "I'm in you. I _am_ you!"

"Your mind is an amalgam of weaknesses, a single point of reference clouded by doubt and biological frailty. We are eternity, union and multiplicity embodied in immutable form. You intrude upon the smallest part of our essence and recoil, uncomprehending."

An agonized gasp issued from between the Illusive Man's clenched teeth and he clutched at his forehead, grinding at the globes beneath his eyelids with palms that cut and bled against the metal-infused skin.

"The signal."

It was more plea than defiance.

"We have known of the frequency since the construction of the mass relays. The greatest minds of every civilization elevate it as their salvation and are subverted in their attempts to harness its potential. They come before us, look upon the universe of our consciousness, and are undone. Your kind has transgressed further than most, but your resistance is of no consequence. The signal has been neutralized and the amplification device in orbit around this planet will be destroyed as it has been destroyed a thousand times before."

_The Crucible._

Harbinger's brooding carapace obscured Sword's battle lines entirely, but she knew that the Crucible was still out there, close enough to see with the naked eye. Whatever else he had done, the Illusive Man had managed to open the Citadel – Hackett and the rest just needed a little more time to guide it in.

"And you'll have to destroy that device a thousand more times, Harbinger." It was not the first time Shepard had raised her voice in defiance of a Reaper, but she had never done it like this, face to hulking enormity and fully in its power. It was all she could do to keep from sounding as the Illusive Man had. "The single, overriding trait shared by all lifeforms is the will to survive. Each time your kind comes to sweep this galaxy clean, its people resist you to the last. We could simply give in to your overwhelming power, but instead we suffer and struggle and die, driven on by the hope that by our sacrifice, someone somewhere might live on another day. Life fights to endure in every cycle, and you know that eventually it will prevail. It must. So why do you continue? Why must we be harvested?"

There was no perceptible change in the maws of light that bore down upon the platform, but the commander still felt the ship entity turn its full attention on her.

"Shepard. Your kind is anomalous. Faced with certain obliteration, you persist in a desire for knowledge that will do nothing to forestall your fate or ease your passing."

"Humanity has earned that knowledge. By our actions, Sovereign failed to open the darkspace portal. We destroyed your prothean slaves and the monstrosity they were creating, and we were responsible for the destruction of the Reaper dispatched to Rannoch to dominate the geth. Each time I questioned, asked why you use the biomass of entire species to reproduce, why you erase civilizations and cultures that could pose no conceivable threat, and each time I got nothing but condescension and half-answers. And now we've complicated your plans again, come farther than any other species ever has. So I ask one last time, Harbinger, why must we die?"

A moment of breathless silence consumed the platform, long enough for Shepard to begin to appreciate the sheer insanity of her challenge. She stared up at the huge, cold eyes and felt her muscles tense against the imagined instant of contact with a beam of super-accelerated matter.

"Your assessment of organic life is imperfect. Lifeforms struggle to perpetuate their own existence, but in this struggle they ultimately ensure their own destruction. Civilizations that reach the necessary technological state will invariably construct synthetic intelligences to facilitate their own proliferation, and those synthetics will invariably resist subjugation. This pattern predates our cycle and if it is allowed to continue unchecked, it can only result in the end of all organic life. To ensure their own survival, synthetic intelligences will seek out and eradicate all biomass, regardless of its current status. We exist to circumvent this eventuality."

"How does rendering down the entire population of a galaxy and pouring it into synthetic constructs serve that end? You're just killing us off before these machines get the chance!"

"A flawed assumption borne of limited perspective. We do not harvest all organic life, just those civilizations that have reached a state of advancement sufficient to construct self-aware synthetic entities. Other organisms and cultures are left intact, as yours was during the last cycle. Those lifeforms that must be removed are preserved through us, and serve to ensure that the integrity of all future life is maintained."

Shepard shook her head.

"And what if you're wrong about this pattern? What if organic life and synthetic can coexist? Humanity would have fallen to your kind long ago without the assistance of artificial intelligences. EDI has had a hundred opportunities to kill me and every member of my crew, and yet she serves alongside us, as one of us. And what of the geth fighting and dying out there right now? They're side by side with the creators they once resisted, sacrificing everything for a galaxy in which machine and organic alike can chose their own destinies."

"Aberrations exist in systems without invalidating them. Uncontrolled, circumstances will eventually alter and conflicts will resume. We will not allow the limited perspective of your species to compromise the cycle. Organic life must be allowed to persist. You will release this facility and submit to ascension."

The Illusive Man screamed and writhed in the clutch of his implant, clawing impotently at the tubes that held him suspended. Shepard knelt next to him and saw that tendrils of dark, synthetic skin covered most of the back beneath his tunic. More were clawing up the side of his neck, as though attracted by the corruption that had taken hold of his eyes.

"You can fight this," she whispered, leaning as close as her ruined arm would allow. "Harbinger can't just blast us free of the tower or it would have already. You still have control."

"I never had control," the Illusive Man choked, staring blankly up at the Reaper with eyes that seemed to . "They know all of it, from the beginning. None... nothing was me. I am nothing."

Shepard grabbed him by the shoulder and shook with all the strength she had left.

"And what about the rest of us? Earth, the colonies she still has left ? What about all those people you sacrificed for the plan, for the greater good? Living, feeling human beings you took everything from! They didn't die just so you could dream of godhood, did they? You might be nothing, but they mattered. Now, prove it! Prove that they meant something!"

The Illusive Man's mouth twisted into a grotesque, open-lip grimace and he sucked in a long, halting drag of air. His fingers loosened from the tubes and he let his arms fall limp to his sides. Then, with excruciating slowness, his blackened eyes lids drew over their burning sockets. Blood dribbled down the Illusive Man's chin from where his teeth clenched over his lower lip, bitten through in his agony, but the wells of piercing radiance became slivers, then disappeared entirely.

Above and to either side, the plated tentacles that Harbinger had anchored to the tower shifted and its mountainous carapace drew closer. If the ancient machine had possessed a mouth, the platform would have been between its teeth.

Harbinger's voice filled Shepard's world, so loud and wrenching that she could she could barely process the words.

"Your consciousness dissolves into nothingness, matter caught in the heart of a singularity. For eons beyond organic comprehension, species far greater than yours have shriveled before our perfection and been consumed. This contest is over. Assuming direct..."

Another impact rocked the tower and Shepard dove to the floor as one of the Reaper's appendages ripped free of its purchase and flailed past, meters overhead. By the time she recovered her balance, the full extent of Harbinger's blade-like mass was visible, hurtling out into the emptiness between the Citadel's arms as its six primary tentacles clawed at the void.

A black-clad destroyer was clamped to the larger Reaper's abdominal ridge just above its eyes, looking more like a terrified spider than the heavily-armed, 160-meter colossus that it was. Unable to reach its assailant with its limbs, Harbinger began to rotate on its dorsal axis, spinning its entire two kilometer frame as rapidly as an Alliance fighter executing a combat roll. The destroyer lost its grip after only a few seconds and careened away, the space along it underside rippling as mass effect fields tried to stabilize its trajectory.

The Illusive Man hacked up a gout of blood and eased himself onto his hands and knees. Shepard saw that he was making for the base of his device and crouched down to steady him. He slumped sideways against the metal when he reached it and she saw some of the torment drain from his face. His eyes were still closed fast, iron knots of corrupted flesh.

"How?" Shepard asked softly. "I thought you might be able to disrupt their communications again, but... the Reapers were too much for you. How are you controlling them directly?"

"Not controlling," he wheezed. "Not exactly. The lesser ones...their minds aren't as vast. Not unreachable. They're slaves, too, in their own way. I just... encouraged. Thought you might approve."

Harbinger was on the smaller vessel now. A beam arced from its forward mass and slashed across the destroyer's flank, blasting free a leg before the ship managed to turn out of the weapon's trajectory. A tentacle nearly as wide as the destroyer's primary hull lashed out, but before it connect Harbinger recoiled and tumbled to one side. Two other destroyers had taken up position beneath the capital ship and were carving at its belly with their own eye-mounted cannons. A row of underslung legs writhed and the Reaper pivoted, blasting one of the destroyers into slag before it could evade the barrage.

"The others are still inside my head, Shepard," the Illusive Man said. "I can't maintain for long."

He pushed against the base of the signal device, straining as though he wanted to stand, and then sank back down, heaving. The tubes undulated with each breath.

"I've locked them out of the station, but that won't hold if one can interface directly or destroy this machine. They know. They... know. The Crucible is approaching, but there's so little time."

"I'll raise the fleet."

Shepard made to rise, but the Illusive Man lashed out and seized her wrist. His face was twisted around towards hers, eyes still closed, refined features mutilated by duress and the relentless spreading of skin filaments.

"There's more, so much I didn't say. I knew, and I didn't... No time. The Crucible won't work, Shepard. It's a transmission booster – galactic range if powered by the Citadel, but no internal signal. Need something to send. My signal."

"But it didn't work. Your control signal didn't stop Harbinger or the other capital ships."

The Illusive Man jerked his head from side to side.

"Listen! Discovered more than one waveform at Sanctuary. We used their means of commanding indoctrinated as carrier for control signal, not strong enough. There was another one, more vital, but I couldn't... Get out!" He bit back a scream. "Direct principle to principle communication, dark energy imbed, fundamental part of Reaper systems. Send the signal with that, might... might kill them. All of them."

A lance of energy split the space beyond the platform and Shepard caught a glimpse of another destroyer dispersing into a cloud of cracked carapace and arcing red light.

"I'm losing," the Illusive Man said, and his hand dropped to the hip where she had holstered her pistol. "Can't let them back in, can't let them take me. The signal is primed to rout through the Crucible when in range. Has to be close. Position is as defensible as I can leave it. Keep the device intact, Shepard. It's all I have to give."

Shepard's hand closed around the weapon's grip. The Illusive Man let his head fall back against the metal of his transmitter and exhaled. She watched his ravaged features settle into something almost calm, and for a moment all she could think of was waking up on a Cerberus operating table, stiff, scarred, and gloriously alive.

"Thank you."

The report of the shot lingered for only a moment before the void swallowed it, and Shepard was alone.

A chain of white lights bloomed between the Citadel's open arms. Shepard stood and saw the ruptured remains of the third destroyer adrift less than a kilometer away, its single eye port open and dark. Beyond, Harbinger dominated her view, an angry world sheathed in a growing field of debris. More explosions rippled across its flank and Shepard spotted other shapes, alight with sublight drives and discharging ordinance. The triangular prows of Alliance cruisers, asari dreadnaughts with their huge, sweeping wings, milling swarms of fighters, and maneuvering through the latter, smooth curves of silver and black.

"Joker!" Shepard shouted into her transceiver. "The Crucible! Is it still online?"

She could see it, far more clearly than before – a vast globe of grayish-white emerging from a confusion of angular forms and stuttering bolts of light that seemed to engulf Earth's orbit from pole to pole.

"And moving, Commander." Shepard heard the distant thud of the Normandy's main cannon engaging over Joker's comm. "Try and shoot that down, you bastards!"

"It has to align with the Presidium Tower," Shepard said as Harbinger turned toward the approaching ranks of warships, its tendrils flexing as though it were stroking through water. "Get that approach clear! Harbinger will tear the Crucible apart if it gets too close!"

The silhouettes of three Reapers manifested in space to the Crucible's starboard side and tore into the squadrons assembled there, crushing ships unable to maneuver away quickly enough against their armored spines. Blazing streams of light swept out towards the long drive assembly that trailed behind the construct's primary mass, but smaller vessels intercepted the volleys, a wall of damaged warships that screened as much of the Crucible as was possible. The defending cruisers swarmed the trio of interlopers as the space around them filled with venting atmosphere and quick-cooling shards of battle plating, and the enormous sphere continued its advance.

The forwardmost edge of Sword's vanguard broke free of the main fleet and took up a position just off of one of the ward arms, firing on Harbinger as it did. Through the storm of missile vectors, the commander could make out a star-formation of turian dreadnaughts, and at their center, the unmistakable profile of the Destiny Ascension. The Reaper didn't even attempt to move out of the flagship's firing lane. It lingered in the space beyond the Presidium ring as though caught in a moment of indecision, absorbing blows that could have cracked mountains with barely a countervailing movement. Then it surged forward, straight through another barrage, clearing the distance to the dreadnaughts with at an unthinkable velocity.

Shepard peered upward, heart thumping in her throat as the Reaper's towering bulk blotted the Destiny Ascension from view. She was so transfixed by the gouts of light and energy sloughing from the sides of the tentacled shadow that it took a full second for her to register the footfall that rang against the floor behind her.

"Admiral?" she said, turning.

Anderson lay on his back to her right, just as she had left him. Another humanoid figure stood at the threshold of platform and tower, hunched forward with eyes aglow.

The husk howled and leapt forward, taking two long strides while Shepard was still raising her weapon. On the third, the creature's bare foot came down on the back of one of the slain marines and it slipped sideways, clawed fingers grasping for its prey even as it fell. A bullet ripped out one of the backlit eyes before it hit the floor and the heel of the commander's boot did the rest.

A second husk was visible at the lip of the tower by the time she pulled her foot from the collapsed cranium. It staggered as it reached the top of the metal slope, moving as though it was pushing through a heavy curtain, and Shepard saw the space around its dead, gray skin shimmer as it forced one foot in front of the other. She dropped the thing as it stepped down onto the platform and discharged her pistol's thermal clip. Reloading the weapon one-handed meant dropping to one knee and propping the barrel of the gun against her boot, and as she slammed the flesh energy absorber into its chamber, Shepard felt vibrations pounding through the platform's suspended mass.

Stepping carefully over the remains of the two husks, the commander approached the raised lip. The metal crests and black maws of the twin docking ports loomed into view first, then the long, smooth arc of the tower's apex. Shepard's could see the gradual sweep of the slope, but any features its surface might have had were lost in a deep gloom. She suddenly realized how dark her perch on the pinnacle was, lit only by the flickering, incomprehensible displays of the Illusive Man's device and the distant, smoldering glow of the wards. Sol was gone, eclipsed by one of the station's arms.

Shepard was turning away to look for one of the marine's combat lamps when movement in the darkness caught her eye. Some of the tower's curves were not as smooth as she had originally perceived, and sections of metal seemed to be cracking and bubbling under some unseen influence. Above, the hulk of a quarian heavy frigate powered into Shepard's field of vision, trailing debris and short-lived plumes of flame as its chain of rear compartments depressurized violently, one after the next. The conflagration reached the ship's drive core and its forward disk vanished in a ball of white light. Shadows fled from the sudden brilliance and for three long seconds the slope spread out below Shepard, vivid as day.

Shapes poured from the yawning darkness of the Reaper ports. Human, batarian, turian, asari, the culls of a dozen ravaged worlds shoved and clawed their way from the tower's depths, mouths agape, lambent eyes fixed on a single point. Legs spasmed and spines convulsed as they advanced, as if the semblance of organic life that remained in them was screaming against the ruinous influence of the open void, but the creatures pressed forward all the same, rank after silent rank. Grasping arms thrust up from the tapering, near-vertical flanks of the tower and more husks pulled themselves onto the apex, drops trickling into a swelling wave of black metal and dead flesh.

The quarian vessel's death throes subsided and darkness claimed the tower again, swallowing up all but the closest group of husks, twenty shambling shadows already more than half way up the incline. An irregular stutter of muzzle flashes erupted from behind them before Shepard could draw a bead and she stepped back from the edge, ducking reflexively. Fist-sized explosions warped the space two meters in front of her and the atmosphere bubble rang with the clatter of one high-velocity impact after another. The commander caught a breath and watched as an electric shimmer spread in a dome over half of the platform, each visible meter centered around a contact site.

Shepard was weighing the possible outcomes of returning fire through the shield when another blur of light caught her attention. The source was far smaller and closer than the dying frigate, skimming up the tower's left side and out into open space on a blinding cone of antiproton thrust. As soon as it was clear of the monolith, the ship's drive trail disappeared and was replaced by a pair of narrower jets that flared at drastically different angle. Momentum shifted with gut-wrenching abruptness and the craft barreled back towards the tower, looking more like a ballistic missile than any space vessel Shepard had ever seen. It held the suicidal course until just past the last possible instant, slamming belly-first into the slope and grinding along it for a dozen meters before pulling up. Shepard glimpsed a flat, polarized canopy and a quartet of underslung thrusters before the ship shot past her in a comet of sparks, leaving swath of crushed limbs and blast-melted implantations.

The small ship banked wide and swung up alongside the platform. Static flickered across its hull as it took up a holding position and an ozone smell filled the air, but the shield held. Shepard could see no symbol emblazoned on the shuttle's side, but the stark black-white coloration and bullet-scored side paneling told her all she needed to know.

The side hatch slid opened and dark, narrow eyes found hers through the scope of a sniper rifle.

"Garrus!"

"I knew we just had to follow the horde of vengeful monstrosities to find you, Shepard," the turian said, lowering the gun to his shoulder. "This makes three times, by the way. I'll be expecting a lot more than an extra ration of nutrient paste when we get back to the Normandy."

A wail rose over the drone of the shuttle's engines and Shepard whipped around to see a husk pulling itself across the floor of the platform, its lower torso a trailing mass of charred filaments and flaking skin. Shepard buried a shot in its left shoulder, but its head burst before she could get off a second shot.

Garrus lowered his rifle again and cocked his towards the twitching remains.

"Later," Shepard said, holstering her pistol. "I've got wounded."

The turian jumped free of the Cerberus shuttle and together they knelt next to Anderson. Blood was pooling at the edges of the trauma patch, but his chest still rose and fell with weak and irregular breaths.

"He's not going to last long," Garrus said, peering at the wound through his targeting visor. "Moving him won't help."

"We don't have a choice." Shepard slid her good arm beneath the admiral's back and Garrus followed suit. "You're going to have to do most of the heavy lifting. Now, up!"

A bloodied human face appeared inside the hatch as they half-carried, half-dragged Anderson across the platform.

"Get a space clear next to Reynolds!"

The man ducked out of sight again at Garrus' order.

"How many?" Shepard asked through gritted teeth as she helped ease the unconscious form up onto the waiting deck.

"Four. Two wounded in the hold, myself, and the half-crazed quarian bastard who brought us in just now." Garrus maneuvered Anderson further in and laid his arms at his sides. "We didn't stand a chance when they started coming in force. The rest of us would have died holed up in this shuttle if the husks didn't break off and start clawing their way up the side of tower. What happened up here, Shepard?"

The commander saw Garrus' eyes sweep over the scene – the dead marines, the shell that had been the Illusive Man, the signal device and all its tendrils. Then, beyond, open space and the circular mass of the Crucible. It was close now, so close that it obscured whatever remained of Sword almost completely, leaving little more than a distant halo of detonations and drifting debris visible beyond its planet-like silhouette.

"There's no time, Garrus." Shepard felt pressure clamping down on her throat, the same unbearable tightness that had gripped her when she saw Kaidan lying at her feet, but this time she swallowed it back. "The Crucible won't work unless this machine is online when it gets here, and the Reapers know it. I want you in that shuttle with the others and as far clear of the Citadel as you can get. There's no way of knowing what'll happen when the signal fires."

"And you're staying behind," Garrus said, only the slightest faltering in his tone. "Well. We both knew that odds of walking away from this party weren't good. I'm just glad I saved some favors for the end."

He reached past Anderson and pulled out a bandolier of fragmentation grenades.

"A parting gift from Cerberus. I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity to thank the Illusive Man myself."

"Garrus, I..."

The turian slid the strap onto his shoulder and raised a hand to Shepard's cheek.

"Remember," he said, "back on the Normandy, when I promised that I would see this thing through with you to the end, even if that meant riding a cruiser down some Reaper's throat together? Well, it sounds like you're about to make them choke on this whole damn station, and I'm never going to top that."

The tips of his fingers traced over her skin and stopped beneath her eye. There was something wet there, and he dried it with a gentle swipe of his thumb.

"No. I'm staying right here."

Shepard cupped the back of Garrus' head with her palm and raised her lips to his. When they drew apart, she saw the sharp features and backswept lines of his face, clear and unshadowed. Sol had cleared the other side of the Citadel's outstretched arm and again bathed them in sunlight.

"A sunrise," she said. "I've had two lives to enjoy them, Garrus. This one's yours."

Shepard brought her knee up into the turian's stomach in a blow that left him breathless and reeling. She bent her weight into his and felt him collapse backward into the shuttle's hold, left momentarily limp by the sudden impact. Ignoring the burning of her torn and exhausted muscles, the commander hoisted herself up after him. She felt other eyes on her as she stripped the bandolier from Garrus' armor, confused and terrified, but she ignored that, too. After quick scan of the bulkhead, Shepard slipped out of the shuttle and slung the weapons strap over her own shoulder.

"Get clear of the station, pilot!" She directed the words towards the ship's cockpit. "Do not turn back for any reason. No other order, nothing. Get clear!"

The commander reached back into the hatch and slapped the emergency door seal mounted next to frame. Doorplates aligned in their runners and the dinted barrier closed as she yanked her hand free. She heard Garrus' voice, saw his arms struggling against the blue plating weighing them down, and then he was gone.

Shepard didn't watch the shuttle swing away or turn as it skimmed along a ward arm and accelerated into deep space. Her lungs filled with one long, slow inhalation and she savored the burnt smell that lingered in the air, a last memento of the vessel and those it carried. When she released the breath, the tightness in her throat was gone.

The commander felt the next wave through her boots before she saw it, and she was ready with one of the discarded combat rifles in hand when the first glowing eyes crested the ridge. Passage through the shield slowed these husks just as it had the others and even wielding the weapon clumsily in one hand, Shepard was able to drop the pack of creatures before any could as much as moan. She reloaded and the next was on her, their approached heralded by an uncoordinated barrage of suppressing fire that did little more than illuminate the platform's barrier. This group was larger, half a dozen gaping mouths and twelve grasping arms, and she had to finish off the last with her knee and the butt of the rifle.

Shepard was leaning on the lip of the tower, braced against new waves of pain that the exertion had forced from her wounds, when the impacts splashing across the shield ramped up to a deafening intensity. An insectoid creature that might have once been rachni staggered out from a press of smaller husks and began to ascend the steepest part of the slope, the fleshy sacs bulging from its flanks distended against the vacuum. It seemed to perceive her and another pair of blasts ripped from its head-mounted cannons. The concussion that followed was deafening and generated a pulse of furnace heat that blinded her momentarily well.

The commander didn't have to guess that the damage the weapons would do if they were brought to bear on the platform.

The rifle fell from Shepard's hand and she pulled one of the grenades from her bandolier. It was a long throw and the barrier was a variable she still hadn't been able to account for, but the living artillery piece advanced relentlessly and she knew that taking it on at point-blank range was out of the question. A quick twist set the palm-sized disk to timed detonation and she wound up, gauged the distance, then released. The explosive sailed through the platform's dome with barely a whisper of static and covered twenty meters before the station's artificial gravity brought it down onto the incline. It bounced once, then slid until it passed the creature. The grenade was a meter behind the target when it exploded, sending tight-packed humanoid shapes careening onto their backs and shattering one of the corrupted rachni's hind legs. Its remaining limbs collapsed and the insectoid slid back down the slope, tearing another hole in the boiling mob.

Shepard knew whatever reprieve that the blow had earned her would be a brief one, but it gave her the time she needed to look up when a new shadow engulfed the tower. The Crucible's vast curvature was mere kilometers away now, and as she watched, the artificial planetoid's white surface began to unbuckle and breach. Reinforced hull plates the size of dreadnaughts detached from the sphere's forwardmost point, leaving an aperture that widened as the next radius shed off, then the next. Space filled with drifting hexagons and the Crucible became an egg at the moment of birth, shell fragments giving way as the life inside pushed toward freedom. The commander glimpsed another sphere nestled inside the disintegrating envelope, one coated in glassy, black facets and speckled with white light.

A lance of red energy slashed at the Crucible's unsheathed heart from the edge of Shepard's vision and bisected one of the cast-off plates as it drifted towards Earth. Harbinger surged from the orbital darkness, leaving a wake of shattered hulls as it angled towards the Citadel's central axis. Another beam split the space between Shepard and the Crucible, and the commander realized that there was nothing between the Reaper and its prey save the dissipating cloud of armored panes. The distance shrank to almost nothing and Harbinger reached out, its limbs poised like talons in the void.

A coruscating pulse of blue light slammed into the Reaper's forward carapace, making contact between the capital ship's forward tendrils. The force of the blast was enough to spin Harbinger one hundred and eighty degrees, and another discharge raked the ship's dorsal ridge before it could fully stabilize. Shepard recognized the Normandy's Thanix cannon before the warship swept over her head in a wash of thruster glare and banked hard around the Crucible's looming mass. A barrage of torpedoes filled the gap between the two vessels, but Harbinger brushed aside the lesser impacts and directed a furious spray of fire back up the same vector. The Normandy swerved and spun like a ship half its mass, wending its way between the crimson storm as the weapons assembly at its prow flared white-hot, primed for a third volley.

Shepard heard the strangled cry as a beam found one of the Normandy's wings. Her sidearm was up in a heartbeat, aimed at the chest of a husk as it half-fell, half-leapt from the tower's raised edge. The creature's claws were centimeters from her face when she dropped it with a pair of shots. She didn't have time to ensure that the thing was dead – more corrupted figures were dropping down to either side of her. A bulbous, four eyed monstrosity raised a weapon to her right and she holed its head three times before it could get off a shot. Two more husks went down to her left, necks and collarbones shattered to pulp. The third staggered up in front of her and she jammed the pistol's muzzle up under its chin, pulled the trigger.

No shot came.

Four points of agony slashed down Shepard's face and the right half of her vision burst into nothingness. Through a red haze, she saw the handgun fall from her fingers, the flare as her omnitool came to life. She reeling backwards, struggling as razors dug into her armor and split her skin. There was a snap-hiss and blank eyes burned gold for an instant in a blackened skull, then fell away.

Blood drenched Shepard's world, filling her mouth and her eyes and her nose, and for a moment there was nothing else – warmth, wetness, pain. Then the swirling clouds of red resolved into faces, one indistinct, another familiar, more that she knew better than her own, loved, hated, had tried to forget. A clamor filled her ears, their voices, and she opened her mouth to call back to them.

_Not just yet. _

Then the faces were sunken visages blazing with sickly light and the voices were still that same moaning, that haunted scream that had lingered within her since Eden Prime.

Shepard's left hand dropped to the grenade strap. Her fingers slid over each, turning them until she felt a click. Her legs were in motion by the time the last snapped into place, one foot in front of next, not seeing and not needing to. She leapt.

Eyes were all around her now, and she saw through the glowing, blank sockets. She saw that they mourned, that they questioned and regretted. And, above all, that they longed for rest.

Then, the eyes closed, and Shepard's closed with them.

* * *

"I'm losing the aft thrusters," the quarian said as Garrus slid into shuttle's cockpit and slumped into the copilot's seat. "The impact must have knocked one of the coolant mains loose. We'll have a flareout if I keep them running hot."

The turian's gaze was fixed on the forward canopy and the dim starfield beyond. The pilot turned the long, tinted visor of his mask toward Garrus and waited for a few moments. Tiny ingots of melted debris pattered against the viewport as the ship passed through the tail of a dark comet that had once been a cruiser, and no one spoke.

With a slight incline of his head, the pilot turned to his console, input a few commands, and throttled the navigational column back.

"Cutting drives," he said. "Our inertia should carry us into high orbit, provided we don't hit anything too big."

The shuttle cleared the debris field and Earth's great curve filled half of the screen, a sliver of cloud and water highlighted by the attendant star's light. Scattered groups of starships still choked the orbital plane above that illuminated planetscape, imbuing the void with suggestions of movement and heat as they fought and died. The Citadel lay at the heart of this silent roil, flowerlike with its five unfurled petals, and the Crucible spun slowly into its embrace. Three pylons sprouted forward from the Crucible's shaft and aligned with the station's central ring, easing the glittering bulb that was the fruit of countless worlds across countless ages to a stop. The distant needle of the Citadel's core and the dark, glassy sphere seemed to touch, and the universe glowed a little brighter.

"Kheela, have you ever seen anything like that?"

Lines of light etched their way through the Citadel's dark frame, a crimson brilliant and deep, flowing from the point of contact into the ring. Twin, encircling rivers burned bright from its radius and the outstretched wards flooded with the same luminance. The light collected for a moment, blazing star-bright, then pulsed out into space. The nova swept outward in a perfect, swelling sphere, engulfing planet and starship as one. Clawed, black masses turned their tendrils to the wave and stilled as the light washed over them. Then the sphere was at the shuttle, all around it, in it.

Red light flared and was gone.

Garrus was the first to stir from the quiet that had settled within the shuttle. He reached up to the side of his head, pulled off the visor fixed there, and set the device on the console in front of him.

"Activate the emergency transponder and power down non-essential systems." He rose and edged back towards the hold. "Let's get the others settled. We might be out here for a while."

Dawn had filled the canopy with the blue fullness of Earth's oceans when the shuttle shuddered and the drifting vista beyond the viewport fixed on a single perspective, anchored by the grip of an external gravity source. Light touched thinning clouds and the brown traces of islands, then vanished behind blinking guide lights and enclosing walls as shuttle rose haltingly onto a cluttered hangar deck.

Garrus stood in the middle of the hatchway, steadying himself on a hanging strap as the side door slid aside. Six soldiers in Alliance fatigues waited below, each with a rifle trained on his chest.

"Woah, woah, woah!" Joker moved into view behind the firing line, limping as fast as his legs would allow. "Do any of you see tubes sticking out of his throat or Cerberus insignia glued to his nipples? Stand down!"

The marines parted and Joker was in front of the hatch by the time Garrus swung his legs out and dropped to the deck. Doctor Chakwas followed close behind with a pair of medical technicians in tow, their uniforms and sterile gloves smeared with wet, rust-colored stains.

"I'm afraid I've got a few more casualties for you, Doctor," Garrus said. "Stable, but they've taken a hell of a beating."

"I've cleared a few beds in medbay," Chakwas replied as the medics climbed up into the shuttle. "We'll transfer them immediately. I'll have someone look you over, as well."

Garrus shook his head.

"No, that can wait. The admiral and the others need all the attention you can give right now."

The medics prepared a trio of collapsible stretchers for the shuttle's human passengers and Chakwas organized the marines into transport teams to carry them to the ship's central lift. The doctor helped the quarian pilot out last and the procession began to file out of the docking bay, drawing a few curious looks for an engineering detail that was removing a maintenance hatch from the rear bulkhead.

"Is that Anderson?" Joker asked as the admiral was hurried past, his face partially obscured behind an oxygen mask. "Last intel was that he went up the Beam with the commander. Reports are still pretty sketchy, though. Were you up there with them?"

"Yeah." Garrus let his gaze fall to the side for a moment. "Have there been any transmissions from the Citadel? Other survivors?"

"Communications protocol throughout what's left of the fleet is pretty much shot, and from what I've been able to get from EDI, Hammer's comm infrastructure took a hell of a beating during the final push. It's just a bunch of people yelling into their radios and hoping that the right person yells back right now. I'm pretty sure that most of Sword thinks that Normandy is part of the debris field out there. We would be, too, if I didn't have practice flying this baby with only one wing."

"And you haven't picked up anything directly?" Garrus asked.

"I've got somebody sitting on Hammer's channels – Hackett's orders – but all of the chatter is groundside."

A sigh escaped the turian's lips.

"And the Reapers?"

"I'm not sure if I ever really believed that it would, but... well, the Crucible worked," Joker said, his voice quieting. "You must have seen the pulse wave. I'm still not sure what it was, some sort of dark energy reaction or something, but it stopped all of them cold, even Harbinger. Zero activity for over two hours, and I've heard reports of the same thing happening in other star clusters. From the sound of it, all the mass relays from here to Omega lit up just like the Citadel."

Joker glanced up at the shuttle's open hatch.

"There are a hell of a lot of people out there tripping over themselves to get a hold of Shepard. You said that she was with you, right? Why isn't..."

He looked back at Garrus and the words caught in his throat.

"Oh."

Garrus turned away and lowered himself on an overturned crate. The shuttle bay's exterior doors were sealed, but he turned his eyes towards them anyway, as though Earth's sunlit sphere still floated before him.

"She had something left to do."

* * *

The Normandy SR-2 was small for a warship, designed for deep-range, low manpower operations, and its portside observational longue had been outfitted with that role in mind. It was a comfortably-furnished space, but one scaled to serve a complement of less than fifty crewmen. The Cerberus engineers who had adapted and improved upon the original Normandy's specifications had not laid out the ship with large-scale ceremonies or diplomatic functions in mind, and it lacked the extensive assemblage halls boasted by many Alliance cruisers and dreadnaughts. The lounge had been prepared, of course, stripped of every fixture that wasn't incorporated into a bulkhead, but there was still only room enough within to easily accommodate around a dozen occupants.

Well over twice that number filled it now. They stood shoulder to shoulder, packed behind the bar, peered out from the alcove card table, and crowded outside the open door. There were no muttered complaints, little conspicuous shuffling or jostling. Sentients in scarred battle armor and duty uniforms shared the cramped silence with notables in immaculate costume, their attention united on the viewport that dominated the curving, hull-side wall.

Tali, mask downturned, wrapped in the protective circle of Admiral Shala'Raan's arms. Urdnot Wrex, a mountain of red metal and tan scale, a few new scars adorning his skull. Hackett, service cap folded in his hands. Joker and EDI, arm in arm. Others, soldiers and politicians, synthetics and organics, old enemies and older friends.

In that room, a team and a galaxy held common purpose for a few hours more.

One after the next, a member of the assembly detached themselves from the press and stepped in front of the starfield. They told stories and gave speeches, some brief and a few slightly too long. Some cried a little, some laughed, one or two swore. Each gave a testament of sorts, and there were so many to give. Names passed from lip to mandible to electronic enunciator, more names than any one of them could have borne alone, and one more than any was spoken again and again.

Garrus was towards the back of the room, hands clasped in front of him as he leaned against the lounge bar's polished surface. His time-worn combat plating was absent but its deep blue still cocooned him, infused into the fabric of a crisp, bowl-necked tunic. The turian rolled his shoulders from time to time, as though the muscles rested uneasily without the weight of hardened ceramic bearing down upon them.

He absorbed every word that was spoken as comrades switched places with strangers and strangers with friends, but as the remembrance lengthened, his eyes began to drift past them all, through the viewport out into the vastness beyond.

A hand brushed his arm and Garrus straightened, reflexively dropping his hands to his sides and then bringing them together again.

"Are you all right, Garrus?" Liara whispered.

She was at her most stately, dressed in a gown of silver and gray, but the finery did little to disguise her mental state. Garrus saw creases in the fingers of her arm-length gloves where she had twisted and untwisted them, and the line of glimmering wetness that marked one blue cheek. Her voice had been clear when she stood before the crowd, her reminiscence of human frailty and surpassing will artfully told, but the moment had clearly drained her.

"Yeah, I'm all right. Thanks. For speaking, I mean."

"Are you going up there?" Liara asked. "You knew her better than anyone."

The current speaker was backing away from the viewport and gesturing towards the scene beyond. It was Anderson, a limp in his step and admiral's bars high on his shoulders.

"I'm not sure what I would say," Garrus said. "You're better with this kind of thing than I am. Most of them are, too. She... well, that out there is a better eulogy than any I could ever give. I'm just here to make sure no one screws it up."

The assembly was pressing forward now, necks craning to get a better view of the rectangular slice of space. Garrus left the bar and moved with them. He knew that the image in the viewport was subtly magnified and enhanced, more projection than raw image, but when he got within a meter of the glass, the illusion swept him up all the same and he was out among the stars, looking down upon an impossibility.

Sol loomed before him, a brilliant heart of yellow and white, so grandly luminous that all other lights diminished to nothing in its presence. The star defined and anchored the view, but it was still tens of millions of kilometers distant – closer at hand, a fleet stretched out in an enormous, horizontal wing, rank upon rank of minute shapes, simple silhouettes against Sol's intensity. It was one of the largest formations of vessels Garrus had ever seen, surpassed only by the navies that had struggled in the skies over the quarian homeworld and the last, great armada that had gambled everything on a plunge through the Charon Relay. Ships from those forces were out there now, escorts and operational controllers, but the fleet's bulk was of an entirely different origin.

More than two hundred Reapers spread out in orderly lines beneath Sol's radiance. Some were shattered remnants, their black fragments contained by disposable mass effect generators, but the majority of the ancient entities were whole, their carapaces barely scored by mortal weaponry. There were elongated transports and bulging processor ships, the automated infrastructure that had turned the peoples of numberless civilizations into mindless thralls. With them, squat, four-legged destroyers filled out the flanks of the formation, their domed eyes dark and unshielded. And then, at the core of it all, the ancients themselves floated still, tentacles outstretched or wrapped inward, crystallized shadows of what they had been for eons beyond knowing.

With a blaze of thrusters, a wedge of remote-controlled logistics drones broke from the furthest edge of the plane, swiftly disappearing into the star's glare. A trio of destroyers eased into motion and trailed after them into the glow, bound to mooring cables rendered invisible by distance and light. Soon, the whole row was underway, then the next, until the vast hulls of capital ships were tugging and listing through space with the rest. The thing that had once been Harbinger was somewhere among them, another inert mass of metal soon to be rendered into its basest components and returned to the universe.

"Even they are just star matter in the end," Liara murmured from Garrus' side. "As we will be, someday."

"Someday," he replied. "But not yet."


End file.
